The Differential Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Small-Scale Development Initiatives, a Cross-Country Comparison.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents Northern-based development organisations with unprecedented difficulties. They are challenged in fundraising opportunities in their home countries and in finding ways to continue their work in the Global South. As the first study to present a systematic mixed method, cross-country study of small-scale, voluntary development organisations in four different European countries, this study provides insight into the role of these private development initiatives (PDIs) in the COVID-19 crisis and sheds light on the differential impact of the crisis on these organisations. Whereas most PDIs are involved in long(er)-term development interventions, the COVID-19 crisis was for most organisations their first experience of emergency aid. Overall, we see strong resilience among PDIs and also find that the organisations which relied more exclusively on traditional methods of fundraising (offline) received a greater funding hit than organisations-often with more younger members-that had already moved to online fundraising.

Explaining monetary donations to international development organisations: A factorial survey approach.

This article investigates what type of international development organisations potential donors would prefer to donate to. We constructed 960 scenarios in which a fictive development organisation was described. The scenarios were randomly varied across eight characteristics of the organisation: size, familiarity, experience, religious character, number of different projects run by the organisation, number of countries in which the organisation is active, overhead costs and staff composition. A large representative sample of the Dutch population (N=2,758) received six randomly allocated scenarios and had to decide if, and if so, how much they would donate to the depicted (fictive) organisation. Results demonstrate that donors have a preference for familiar organisations with several years of experience. Although donors have a strong aversion regarding overhead costs, we find that donors seem to value the capacities of paid staff members and are, to a certain extent, willing to pay a price for these. The ideal development organisation combines features typical of small(er) scale voluntary development organisations (e.g. mainly run by volunteers) and large(r) scale professional organisations (e.g. running development programmes in numerous countries).