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This brief discusses the policy implications of the findings of a recent large scale study of UK egg and sperm donors. Since 2005, UK sperm and egg donors must consent to being identifiable to people conceived from their donation(s), should they request that information at age 18. There has been much speculation, but limited empirical research, on how donors might feel about this change. The Curious Connections study, which included interviews with donors, their relatives and professionals who work with them, examined how donors and their families experience donation in the context of increased openness. The study found that contemporary sperm and egg donors were overwhelmingly supportive of the move to “identity-release” donation. However, current UK policies do not fully reflect the range of ways in which donors and their families experience and understand what it means to donate egg or sperm. The authors recommend a range of policy and practice changes, including increased flexibility regarding information sharing between donors and recipient parents, the provision of long-term support for donors and their families, enabling children of donors to register with the Donor Sibling Link, creating a voluntary register of donor conceptions arranged outside of licensed clinics, and increased support for known donor conception.

The purpose of the study was to classify donors who make large donations and those who make small donations to athletics programmes. In particular, the study investigated the degree to which involvement with the athletics programme, income and donor type discriminate individuals who make large donations from those who make small donations in an effort to predict donation level of prospect donors. The hypothesis that the three variables (involvement with the athletics programme, income and donor type) would classify athletics donors of small donations from athletics donors of larger donations was confirmed. The findings of the study provide theoretical and practical implications in predicting donation size, determining donor cultivation strategies and increasing fundraising effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what would make disaster donors different from non-donors, with particular attention paid to differences in two forms of donations: the monetary donation that directly benefits the beneficiary and the charitable donation that is used by charitable organizations to support their disaster relief activities. Differences in the perceived effectiveness of other disaster relief activities, skepticism about charitable organizations, disaster experience, disaster preparedness, and disaster insight were also examined between the two groups.

A total of 300 Japanese participants were asked to complete a14-item questionnaire online. A series of comparative analyses were conducted to examine differences between donors and non-donors in the questionnaire items.

Although non-donors evaluated the effectiveness of the monetary donation more positively than the charitable donation, donors evaluated the effectiveness of all the disaster relief activities more positively than non-donors. Moreover, donors were more prepared for disasters and more insightful into the current situation of the disaster victims than non-donors.

Along with the internal and external factors previously found, disaster awareness may be a key to increasing people's intention to donate for disaster victims. Such awareness could be fostered through successful disaster education and appropriate media coverage of disasters.

The findings that non-donors generally have a less positive view of disaster relief activities imply that non-donors may be less knowledgeable than donors about how charitable activities can work and benefit disaster victims.

Purpose – Although not extensively documented, academic libraries in the United States of America have been involved in fund-raising for centuries. In more recent years, decreases in university budgets forced academic libraries to rely more heavily on philanthropy in order to operate or expand collections. However, much remains unknown about many aspects of academic library fund-raising. This study expands knowledge regarding library development efforts so that scholars and library administrators can better understand library fund-raising and become more successful in raising money.

Findings – Development work for academic libraries has shown to differ from other forms of development activities on a campus due to the fact that donors to academic libraries tend to differ from other kinds of donors on a campus. This research highlights strategies academic library development officers believe work in cultivating donors from a limited target population and how they believe this differs from or is similar to the work of other development officers in higher education.

Practical and social implications – This research sought to understand how organizational placement of the library development officer in the university has an impact on successful fund-raising.

Originality/value – This is the first research to directly study academic library development officers. This will help library administrators and those involved with academic library development efforts learn what library development officers believe works and doesn’t work in fund-raising.

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.