Should charities threaten potential donors?

Earlier this year, I blogged about my dislike for charities who try to guilt donors by mailing out unsolicited gifts. While I find this to be an offensive practice, my friend Tom recently received a mailing from a charity called Smile Train that may have topped this. (In case you're wondering about the picture below, Smile Train "is dedicated to helping the millions of children in the world who suffer from cleft lip and palate").

A dark side to diversity

We are lucky to live in a very multicultural society in Canada, where our differences are tolerated and celebrated. But can diversity have a dark side?

I am a co-author of a recent working paper, with James Andreoni, Abigail Payne and Justin Smith. Our study, titled Diversity and Donations: The Effect of Religious and Ethnic Diversity on Charitable Giving, looks at the role a neighbourhood's diversity plays in determining how much people donate to charity (the paper is gated, but most people with a university email address should be able to get a free copy from the link above). I encourage anyone who is interested to give it a read and send us any feedback you have (there is also an interesting discussion in the comments feed of the Freakonomics blog).

In neighbourhoods that are more diverse — in terms of ethnicity or in terms of religion — Canadians tend to donate less to charity. This is disappointing, and could have potential implications for public policy. Governments and charities often provide similar types of social services, and if charitable giving decreases down as neighbourhoods continue to diversify, there may be more pressure on government to provide benefits that have historically been provided by charities.

Charities' guilt gifts overstep the bounds

My fiancée received an interesting gift in the mail recently from a charity called Plan Canada. They were asking for money to lift poor girls from around the world out of poverty.

 

The gift was "a small friendship bracelet of hope," accompanied by a picture of a cute young girl. The back of the photo reads, "This is Lina from Peru. She has already found a sponsor. Please sponsor a child like her. Many thanks."