Week 3

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog.

At my onsite placement, I’ve gotten to speak with more gift officers and was able to dive into the concept of planned giving. This is the type of giving where people will write charitable organizations into their wills, and is a very interesting niche in the world of fundraising. Something that I took away from my conversations discussing planned giving was how personal the approach made had to be to attract a potential planned giver. Especially in economic literature, charitable giving can often be made out to seem like nothing more than a transaction in which a donor gives something and gets something back, but in reality, this isn’t the case. Planned giving in particular spotlights the human element of charitable contributions, which is something I hope my research can continue to reflect. As I uncover and explain more and more motivations to give, this human element becomes increasingly prevalent, and its importance to charitable giving is something I hope my project will continue to convey. 

This week was mostly focused on editing my research paper. Since I had most of the base information I wanted to get across consolidated, my next steps were reorganizing the concepts in a more understandable manner, providing more definitions and explanations of topics to help the paper’s general clarity, and spending more time with individual points to better the paper’s pacing. I also added introductory paragraphs to the individual concept sections of the paper to further streamline its reorganization when I eventually have the other sections complete. This leaves the paper’s introduction and conclusion as the next two major sections to be done. Additionally, I’d also like to continue fleshing out the behavioral economics connections sections of the paper, with a more in depth explanation of solicitation and its effectiveness.

See you all next week.