Alyssa Huberts on her Raines Project

            When I was in high school and went to college information sessions, I always used to tune out during the presentation’s segment on undergraduate research. Research conjured images for me of professors in lab coats analyzing test tubes, or at least psych students conducting surveys and experiments. I wanted to study international development: what undergraduate research could I do?

            This summer’s commitment to three months of independent research, then, was four years in the making. At Georgetown, I have found that research occurs across fields, in nearly every department. I first got involved within the International Political Economy department, when a professor writing about vote buying at the United Nations asked me to look over his book, checking its accessibility for the undergraduate economic student target audience and editing the text for grammar (he knew I worked for The Hoya). Another casual conversation turned into an opportunity to work with two of my professors on econometric research of causes of international piracy, and from then on I was hooked. Research is challenging in a way that traditional classroom learning lacks: you don’t know whether the answers to your questions actually exist. When I hit challenges, I couldn’t go running to office hours for help. It was mental gymnastics, a constant exercise in problem solving.

            My project under the Lisa J. Raines Fellowship this summer was motivated by a presentation I attended about the changing face of international development. In recent years, development has seen a shift toward short-term accountability, high impact results, and technology. Highly relevant to this shift, then, are what I term online philanthropic marketplaces: websites that accommodate electronic giving to a wide range of nonprofits. I chose to focus on GlobalGiving, one such marketplace that has raised more than $88,000,000 for nonprofits since its founding in 2000. GlobalGiving’s entry mechanism for nonprofits is called the Open Challenge, a 4-week crowdfunding campaign where organizations try to raise $5000 in four weeks. My question was this: When nonprofits participate in GlobalGiving’s Open Challenge, do they learn from the process?

            I focused my analysis on nonprofits that had competed multiple times on GlobalGiving, and ran econometric regressions to test the effect of being a ‘veteran’ competitor. I was surprised to find that, by my measure of learning, which focused on nonprofits raising more money in one challenge than in the previous one they had entered, organizations were actually performing worse across challenges.  Could it be that they were ‘un-learning?’ Why were they performing worse?

            My research has left room for many further questions, but also has pointed in the direction of a few potential explanations. The structure of GlobalGiving is such that after nonprofits meet the $5000 threshold, they are not required to enter challenges anymore – they are just permanent members on the site. This means that many of the ‘best’ organizations (those most successful at fundraising) actually only enter one challenge. This attrition bias is definitely the reason for some portion of my findings. However, the results are robust beyond this attrition bias, and as such, there must be other elements at work. I hope to look more closely into the strong relationship between social media and GlobalGiving: the number of Facebook likes is actually the strongest predictor for the success of an organization. As such, it is my hypothesis that most of the donors who give through GlobalGiving are donating to organizations that they are at least loosely already affiliated with. If donorship is limited to an organization’s circles of association, it’s possible that donor burnout is accounting for lower donations across multiple challenges.

            Many questions still remain about the data, especially because most organizations surveyed have an extremely positive experience with GlobalGiving. Further research will be necessary to find out what benefits or learning curves they are experiencing, as it seems that increases in donations are not an effective measure of the marketplace’s benefits.

            My perspective on research has changed drastically from my high school self’s apathy. Instead of too few questions, I now have too many. But as Dean Kaneda says, with research, if you stop asking questions, you’re probably doing something wrong.