The Most Skeptical Donors Gave the Most

I almost got this one wrong.

Last week a post from Candid came across my feed. It had a bold graphic and a confident headline: “Connection, more so than trust, leads to increased generosity.” Under it was a chart of giving by how connected donors felt. Trust was nowhere on the chart.

I knew what I thought before I finished reading. This is marketing. A ranking with nothing underneath it. I was ready to say so.

Then I found the link. Behind the post was an article, and behind the article was a real study. Charity Navigator and Mutiny Co. had surveyed more than a thousand Americans and sat down with twenty of them for longer interviews. “You have no data” would have been answered in one line.

I had answered a headline without reading the research. That is the very habit I spend most of my working life asking us to break.

So I went back and read it properly. The most useful finding in the study is not the one on the chart.

Here it is. The donors who were most skeptical of charities gave the most. Not a little more, either. Close to a third more than donors who weren’t skeptical at all.

Read that again. The people who trust charities least gave the most.

How can that be? The article takes it as a sign that trust doesn’t always lead to giving. That’s a fair reading. But I think there’s a better one, and it starts with what the survey actually asked.

As far as I can tell from the public summary, trust was asked about charities in general. Connection was asked about one specific cause or organization. Those are two different questions.

Think about doctors. Plenty of people distrust “the medical system” and still trust their own doctor completely. They’ve seen her for years. She has kept her word. Ask them about doctors in general and you get one answer. Ask them about their doctor and you get another.

Donors work the same way. A donor can be deeply suspicious of “charities” and fully confident in the one organization she has watched deliver for years. I suspect that describes a good share of our best donors.

Trust in charities and trust in your charity are two different things.

The headline ranked one against the other as if they were the same.

The report’s own findings point the same way. Most people, about two in three, start out suspicious of a charity they don’t know. Even among people who say they trust charities completely, nearly half start out suspicious. Trust doesn’t transfer. It is earned one organization at a time.

The study also asked what had made people trust a charity more. The top answers were a good personal experience, proof of impact, honesty about where the money went, and being treated well as a donor.

I read that list twice. It isn’t a list of feelings. It’s a list of things an organization did and then let the donor see. Promises kept, and made visible.

I want to give the study its due, because it earns it. The report is more careful than the post. Kelly Herrington of Mutiny Co., who interpreted the findings for Candid, also says trust is what gives a relationship its credibility. The article’s advice on transparency is sound. And there is a true warning here: goodwill toward the sector won’t turn into dollars for your organization. A donor’s attachment to you predicts giving better than warm feelings about charities in general. I agree with that.

Where I get stuck is the ranking. Two questions sit underneath it.

The first is which came first. Picture a regular at the corner diner. Does she come every morning because she feels at home? Or does she feel at home because she comes every morning? Probably both. Giving works that way too. Someone whose family was helped by a nonprofit will feel close to it and give more. But the more people give, the more they hear from us, and the closer they feel. Connection may be partly a result of giving, not only a cause of it. A survey taken at one moment can’t tell which.

The second is time. The study measured one year of giving. Its conclusion is about something longer, that connection builds a more lasting foundation than trust alone. Lasting is a retention question. One year of giving tells you how much water is in the bucket. It doesn’t tell you whether the bucket leaks. As far as the summary shows, nobody checked for leaks.

So what do we do with this on Monday?

Here’s the question I’d take back to the office. Do our donors trust charities, or do they trust us? Think back to the doctor. She can’t change how people feel about the medical system. She can keep her word to the patient in front of her. Trust in us works the same way, one gift and one kept promise at a time. That part is ours.

There’s one more thing I owe, because it would be easy to skip.

If I hold this study to “show me the measure,” Show Me the Receipts has to pass the same test. Our central claim is that a written record of kept promises predicts whether donors stay. That is still a hypothesis. It hasn’t been measured either. This study doesn’t disprove it, and it doesn’t prove the study wrong. Neither of us has measured trust in one organization next to a record of what that organization promised and delivered.

That’s the study our field needs. Trust and connection, asked about the same organization. Several years of staying, not one year of dollars. And some way to see whether promises were kept. Charity Navigator is better placed than almost anyone to run it. I’d read every page.

I started the week sure I knew what that post was. I was wrong about the post, and the study taught me something. Read the report before you answer the post. A headline can carry more than its method. And the most skeptical donors gave the most.

The trust that matters isn’t the trust donors have in charities. It’s the trust they have in you. The study’s own respondents told us what builds it.