The Research Project
My final year dissertation project in Business Management at the Anglia Ruskin University seeks to gain an understanding of how trust between charities and their donors can be built over the internet. My main focus is on initial trust.
Working title: E-Philanthropy: Building donor trust over the Internet
Research objectives
- To investigate the influences on online trust
- To establish suitable criteria to measure online trust
- To understand the importance of trust for online donations
- To understand how online trust can be built
- To give recommendations on how to build online trust
Research design
The research is split into two distinct parts, from an organisational point of view and from a prospective supporter.
Fundraising charities
The first consists of a survey aimed at fundraising charities that investigates their online activities and the respective success and a follow up interview with selected organisations that have agreed to such an interview. The interview lasts about 30 minutes and goes into more depth regarding the online activites of the charity as well as giving the charity an opportunity to express their thoughts on building trust over the Internet.
The survey aimed at fundraising organisations can be found here.
Prospective supporters
The second stage utilises another survey to look at the general public’s trust in charities and how charities could then build trust over the Internet. This survey is aimed at existing donors, newsletter subscribers and the public in general.
This survey, aimed at the general public, can be found here, please feel free to distribute it to your supporters.
Additionally to this, I will proceed with looking at individual’s perception of two charity websites, let them rate various aspects and how trustworthy they feel about the charity based on their website.
You can download the introduction to my dissertation, which also includes the research objectives (this is still a work in progress and might change for the final version of my dissertation).
