Choosing your charity: the importance of value congruence in two-stage donation choices

Charitable donations constitute choices, and donors' values influence both the choice to donate and the selected nonprofit organization (NPO). The current study proposes a new instrument to measure NPO values. The proposed two-stage analytical procedure is novel in this research area. The first stage shows that the personal value of universalism drives the general decision to donate. The second stage reveals that donating to a specific NPO depends on the congruency between the NPO values of the organization and the individual donor's NPO values. Furthermore, distinct NPO values are relevant to donation decisions such that NPO values can attract a particular type of donor to an NPO. These findings have pertinent implications for NPOs' chosen positioning strategies as it allows NPOs to collectively guard the qualities that increase general donations and individually distinguish themselves based on the specific NPO values that ensure alignment with their own donors.