Men cited helping children as their top cause for volunteering and donating to charity, a new study has found.
The findings suggest that family dynamics might play a larger role in motivating men to give and volunteer than fundraisers, communications staff, and others working on behalf of charities have realized, says Brittany Hill, the study’s lead researcher.
The study surveyed more than 1,500 men of ages 18 to 79 who responded to online questions examining their motivations and preferences in supporting charitable causes.
Seventy-three percent of the men in the study said they gave money to charity. Forty-four 44 percent of those respondents said they gave less than $25 per month, and 9 percent said they gave more than $100 per month.
Ms. Hill said that she and her colleagues were motivated to do the study, which they titled “The Forgotten Man,” after noticing a growing emphasis on women. “In recent years,” she wrote, “we’ve noticed an industrywide shift in focus towards women as the target audience for cause efforts.”
The study asked the men to name their top three charitable causes. After concluding the top cause among all ages is children, the study found age differences among men in their second and third most-preferred issues or services: Millennials 18 to 34 years old tended to choose advocacy and social services, while men 35 to 54 were most likely to chose disaster relief and arts or education. Men in the boomer generation, from 55 to 79 years old, selected church and health as their second and third most-preferred causes.
The research was conducted by Good Scout, a consulting company that helps charities and companies enhance their visibility through good works.
Research on men’s charitable motivations typically compares how men and women respond to identical questions. Ms. Hill says her men-only study relied on other research conducted in the past three years to draw conclusions about gender differences in charitable behavior, as well as research on gender differences among consumers.
Women make a majority of household spending decisions, Ms. Hill says, and they are more likely than men to support charities. Women also engage more readily in sharing and recommending causes on their social networks. A majority of men in the Good Scout study, 71 percent, said they have never shared information on their charitable activities on social media.
“Women tend to communicate, share, and connect with others on social media,” Ms. Hill wrote. “Men use social media to conduct research, read the news, or watch daily videos. They initiate in-person meetings through social media and certainly do not proactively share information in this way.”
Because of these differences, she said, other ways of engaging men, such as texting or networking events, might be more effective than using social media. Fundraising campaigns for men, such as Movember, in which men grow mustaches in November to help raise money and awareness to fight prostate cancer, offer other clues about what works in appealing to men, she added.
“Challenge their natural competitive spirit,” Ms. Hill wrote, “but do it through their friends and family and not through peer-pressure tactics.”