Week 0: Introduction

Hello everyone. I’m Diego Griffin, a senior at BASIS Independent Brooklyn, welcome to my blog. My senior project is about making a connection between two fields I’m interested in: behavioral economics and charitable giving.

To be more specific, my research question is as follows: how can nonprofits use behavioral economic principles to leverage the social, emotional, and financial factors that motivate individual American donors to give to charity and increase donations? In other words, I’d like to provide an overview of the social, emotional, and financial factors that motivate people to give, and analyze the current strategies being employed to act on these motivators, potentially offering further tactics from behavioral economics, the study of choice, that could have some applications. My methods of research will come in two phases: a literature review on current knowledge, and a series of interviews with organizations for more specific information and an evaluation of my findings. My onsite placement will be at the Brooklyn College Foundation, and it’ll help me gain a greater understanding of what approaches the organization takes to attract donors and how resources are allocated to do the most good.

Giving to charity has become an increasingly popular way of making a difference, and individual donations make up a large percentage of the charitable giving in our country. As the number of issues to tackle also grows, understanding how to garner the most support and help people follow through on their good intentions becomes critical. This is what makes my research valuable, the more information on what motivates people to give and how to act on those motivations, the greater a difference can be made. Some of my personal goals going into this project are to understand more of the connections behavioral economics has to other fields, how to effectively motivate people, and to win a prize for having the most serial-killer like senior photo on the blog page.

You can access my full senior project proposal here.