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May 14, 2008

What Drives Disaster Donations

Stephen J. Dubner, writing on The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, says it’s a safe bet that you haven’t donated to help cyclone victims in Myanmar. Why not?

Well, for starters, news-media attention tends to drive donations. Americans gave about $1.92-billion to help victims of the 2004 tsunamis, compared with just $150-million after the earthquake that struck Pakistan the following year.

Mr. Dubner ventures that most of his readers probably remember news-media coverage of the tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina, but probably not much at all from the Pakistan earthquake. He highlights a recent paper by Philip H. Brown and Jessica F. Minty, produced by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, showing the impact of news-media attention on donations to relief groups following the 2004 tsunamis.

The study showed that “an additional minute of nightly news coverage increased donations by 0.036 standard deviations from the mean, or 13.2 percent of the average daily donation for the typical relief agency. Similarly, an additional 700-word story in The New York Times or Wall Street Journal raises donations by 18.2 percent of the daily average.”

And what drives news-media attention of disasters? Mr. Dubner takes the cases of the Myanmar cyclone and the China earthquake, and cites several reasons why coverage has been lacking.

• The focus on the presidential campaigns is squeezing out attention to other issues.
• Most Americans probably couldn’t find Myanmar on a map.
• Covering far-away disasters is expensive and time-consuming.

“So given the particulars of the disasters in Myanmar and China, as tragic as they are, I feel pretty confident in predicting that U.S. charitable contributions in each case won’t be very large,” says Mr. Dubner. (For an update on giving so far, see this Chronicle article.)

He wonders: “Does this mean that human beings are shallow and selfish — that they only give to a cause when it is attractive to them on some level? Will the future produce some sort of ‘disaster marketing’ movement in which aid agencies learn to appeal to potential contributors?”

What do you think drives donations to disasters? Why do some crises generate outpourings of support while others generate few donations, if any at all?

— Caroline Preston

Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink

Comments

1. The reason that I have not given to Myanmar yet is my own concern about whether or not the junta government will allow supplies in, and that we can’t guarantee that, if they get in, the supplies will get to the people who need them. I have seen and heard several news stories about the government taking the supplies rather than allowing them to move on to the victims.

   — MHM    May 19, 01:49 PM    #

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