Competition and strategic responses to fundraising in donative markets

Nonprofit (NP) organizations provide key social service goods but rely on donations, obtained in a competitive environment, for that provision. Yet most research focuses on competition in the output markets without considering inter- and intra-sector competition in the markets for donations. This paper develops and estimates a model of NPs’ fundraising to secure donations. We highlight the strategic nature of the fundraising decision and show theoretically that rival NPs’ fundraising responses can be either strategic complements or strategic substitutes but find empirically that responses are predominantly strategic substitutes. We find that donors are relatively inelastic to fundraising but also that NPs have nontrivial responses to rival’s fundraising and these effects are stronger within than across sectors. However, in totality, the across sector impacts are important to consider. We find that counterfactually removing a NP from a market increases equilibrium NP-level fundraising but decreases total fundraising in the market.