Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No.1

A segment that exists in my venture market (comprised with an emphasis on the younger generations) is college students. College students are the ones who are developing the education and skills needed to become a beneficial member of society -- therefore many are passionate about philanthropic and benevolent causes.

In order to get more diverse data, I interviewed students from various colleges around the state. They all share similar variations of the need -- people want to actually feel like they're making a difference when they make generous donations to certain causes. People generally are more likely to give when incentivized. People want to directly address the climate change issue, as that's the only way to actually make a difference; action is needed.

Many of the responses agreed that people feel a lot more secure when their money is going to directly to getting help -- like buying physical supplies such as food, water, electronics, medicine, etc. They don't feel as secure when the message is that the donation will "help raise awareness." Problems arise when there are unanswered questions such as, "where is my money going? how is it curing these disease or fixing this problem?" etc.

The way that people go about solving this question is by taking time to do their own research on what their money is going towards, what the organization supports, and how exactly donations are going to be used. The problem, however, is even furthered when people still don't know the answers to these questions even after taking time to do their own research.

One of the respondents, an 18 year old first-year college student, said that they would be a lot more comfortable if organizations didn't provide vague answers to these questions. For example, if the cause is dedicated to curing a disease and the money donated is "going for research," they can say instead "money goes towards equipment and new technologies required to identify new information of said disease and help find a cure, a treatment..etc." Another example is, instead of saying that money is being used to raise awareness, it is "raising money to create advertisements that will be able to branch out our cause more people in order to effectively raise awareness."

Overall, I found as a result that the widespread lack of donation information is a huge problem for donors and could perhaps even make them uncomfortable. Our consumeristic perspectives create an "expectation" of our money to be returned with a material good -- therefore, the ambiguity with understanding where our donation money goes generates a lot of insecurity within donors. They want as much specifics and details as possible in order for people to feel more comfortable and therefore more willing, and perhaps incentivized to donate.