The Joy of Asking: An Analysis of Socioemotional Information in Fundraiser Contact Reports

Abstract

In this study we examined 381 interactions between Donors and Fundraisers from a large research university by analyzing their Contact Reports. Specifically, we examined whether we could extract measures of fundraiser empathy through the application of a coding scheme and linguistics analysis, and whether there are differences in the reports based on donor characteristics. We found evidence that there are significant differences between how fundraisers write reports and what they include in them, based on school of graduation and type of interaction, but little difference in their treatment by donor gender. We conclude that indeed measures of empathy can be extracted from Contact Reports, but that minimum standards of reporting should be adopted by fundraising organizations in order to support using Contact Reports as qualitative evaluation tools.