Donors crave more and better information about charities, information that will help them make smarter decisions about which groups they support.

That assumption has driven a lot of the discussion about philanthropy in recent years, writes Cynthia Gibson, a senior vice president at the Philanthropic Initiative, on the organization’s blog and in the Nonprofit Quarterly. And she says that idea seems to be behind recent grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to two philanthropy consulting groups, to help them develop tools that will enable donors to give more intelligently.

But do donors really want more information?, Ms. Gibson asks. And even if good data existed on nonprofits’ impact, would donors really use it to decide how to channel their charity?

Ms. Gibson and her co-author, William Dietel, former president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, suggest that data may not have the power to shape donors’ giving as much as some people in the nonprofit world hope.

Nonprofit officials she interviewed said that, while strong data enhances their organizations’ credibility, most of their donors are still looking for “emotional connections” with a group. A book by Princeton University associate professor Daniel Oppenheimer, to be released next month, concludes that the “large majority of donors will give as a result of emotional or relational factors.”

Ms. Gibson says that “while metrics are critical and have their place,” the “data dash” of recent years has sometimes overlooked how personal relationships, social networks, family dynamics, passion for causes, and other factors shape giving. She and Mr. Dietel suggest that the nonprofit world needs to strike a balance “in assessing what donors need and want—and that that balance falls somewhere between data and desire.”

How important is data to your donors? Do you agree that the nonprofit field has overlooked the art of giving in favor of science?