Gender Generosity

Via Arts and Letters Daily was an article by Christina Hoff Sommers that appears in In Character, “Men or Women: Which is the More Generous Sex?”

The short answer is, it matters on the situation. The long answer, which will give you some guidance in how you make your donor appeals, is contained in the article.

Depending on how laboratory experiments are designed either men or women end up emerging as more generous. When the design rewards risk taking, men come to the fore. When the design was purely about generosity, women were kinder.

This latter situation was also borne out by surveys where women’s answers about their generousity outstripped those of men.

However, outside of the lab and away from questionnaires, things are quite different. In a 2003 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center it was determined that when it came to actually doing something for others, “gender is not noticeably related to altruistic behaviors.”

As the article points out, women and men are different in the way they express their concern for others. Society places women in a nurturing role and men in risk taking roles. Men become firefighters and jump into burning buildings, women become nurses and tend to the burns. The article notes there is nothing wrong with men or women fulfilling either of these roles.

But what about when it comes to donating money and not saving or soothing lives? Well, it looks like in practical terms, men are more willing to part with money than women.

A 2005 analysis of federal tax data by NewTithing Group, a philanthropy research institute in San Francisco, shows that even when you control for income and assets, males still write larger checks than females. As the New York Times summarized the NewTithing findings: �The study found that single men, generally, are more generous than single women. Among the wealthiest singles, men gave 1.5 percent of assets compared with 1.1 percent for women. Wealth does not explain the disparity.�

If this isn’t what you want to hear or doesn’t mesh with your experience, then read the article. It goes into more detail and cites specific examples from fundraisers.

A couple things to pay attention to though–1) All people quoted as saying women don’t give enough are in higher education fundraising, not arts or social charities. The article alludes to this as a weakness in the argument in regard to a UCLA quote by acknowledging the female graduates might be sending their money elsewhere, but it could as easily apply to the whole article.

2) Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the right of center American Enterprise Institute which may or may not have an interest in portraying males in a positive light for giving $10,000 while saying the wife who only donates $500 can afford to give more.

Still the article provides enough generally unbiased information to perhaps illuminate and guide fundraising campaigns and direct asking strategies. For example, a study by economists James Andreoni and Lise Vesterlund: (remembering this is in a controlled lab situation)

“When altruism is expensive, women are kinder, when it is cheap, men are more altruistic.” They also showed how their findings (along with several other studies they cite) could have important implications for fund-raising as well as tax policy. For example, if the Internal Revenue Service were to increase the price of donating to charity by no longer allowing deductions, it is quite likely that men would react more negatively than women. (On the other hand, women could object that the present system favors male styles of giving.)

Listen, The Business of the Arts

I was frankly quite surprised as I drove around this past Sunday to hear a radio program on the business end of the arts. The program is a pretty new one for the local public radio station.

Called, appropriately enough, The Business of the Arts, the show’s goal is to shed a little light on the concerns organizations face that are mostly invisible to the public until there is trouble.

Financing of the arts is a mystery to most people. People complain that the cost of tickets keeps going up, whether it’s for the Opera, the Symphony, or the Academy of Arts. But if you tell someone that the cost of that ticket does not come close to paying for the event or exhibition, they are surprised.

Host Bob Sandla talks to representatives of arts organizations on Oahu that are attempting to be fiscally prudent and responsible while providing high quality services to their audiences. Bob and his guests discuss individual companies to pinpoint their specific challenges and achievements and explore the misunderstandings and difficulties they face.

I don’t know what the listenership is on Sundays at 6 pm, but I figure they may not be educating their largest audience segment. Still, it is really gratifying to see the program is on at all and their episodes are available online.

In the segment I heard, the host made sure the guest discussed where every percentage of the budget went, what things were and were not covered, what the goals of the organization were, how things were planned, what the dream situation for the organization would be.

I found it interesting. But then I am in the business, am familiar with the terminology and wasn’t really thinking critically about the effectiveness of the format and presentation because I was so grateful to have the subject tackled at all.

So if you think it is a good idea, go bug your local public radio station. If they are smart, they can turn it into a case for supporting the station as well. In an intro to the program I was listening to the station’s president talked about how the challenges the organization being interviewed faced were the same ones the station dealt with.

Getting Soft In Your Head

Have you ever driven by a new store and seen people going in and out and wonder how you could have missed the hoopla that surrounds a Grand Opening? Well chances are the Grand Opening hasn’t happened yet and what you see is a soft opening.

A soft opening is an unannounced opening of a store that allows for the evaluation of operations in order to correct them before a highly publicized grand opening which might highly publicize said problems. It also helps an entire staff of new employees put their training into effect under less stressful circumstances.

If you have the patience to take part in the exercise as a customer, it can be rewarding. I got a free meal when a restaurant did a soft opening and there are tales of the lucky amusement park attendees who have been offered a chance to ride hot new rides before the offical opening date.

It occurred to me this weekend that the practice would be helpful for new performing arts facilities. On July 1st the new center at Bethel Woods opened with the New York Philharmonic. Most readers may be more familiar with the locale as the site of Woodstock after the folks in Woodstock, NY in Ulster County withdrew their permission for the 1969 performance. (That hasn’t kept you from cashing in on the name though has it, Woodstock :P)

Bethel Woods had a good opportunity to do a soft opening on June 21 when the Mid-Hudson Philharmonic played there to allow the pavillon and orchestra shell designers to make adjustments. They did have employees there for training in preparation for the opening that night. However, given that access to the site is by narrow winding roads (I am from that part of NY, I have driven to the grounds) and the fact that weeks of torrential rains have battered Sullivan County there were a lot of details that a soft opening could have brought to the fore. (As a guy who ran a few outdoor music festivals in a rural environment upon which it had rained before and during, I can speak with some authority. Boy, do they have my empathy!)

I know someone who worked the opening day and she was fairly critical of the disorganization that she saw. To be fair, some of it was going to happen even with the benefit of the soft opening. Short of implanting mind control chips in the concert goers, some of it will still be happening in 5 years. (And it was certainly more organized than Woodstock was!)

But there were a lot of avoidable problems that a soft opening would have certainly revealed and there were a lot of people who said they would never come back again as they left. That probably won’t impact the Ashlee Simpson concert on Sunday since there most likely isn’t a big audience overlap. You also can’t please everyone even under the best conditions. It just seems a shame to make such a poor first impression to such a large audience of people who, lets face it, tend to be influential.

Most of us won’t be involved with the opening of new facilities but those that are would do well to at least consider a soft opening. I will confess though that I did have a hand in the opening of a new facility. We didn’t have a soft opening and everything went very well.

But as I said, I was there.

Music to My Eyes

It has long been a custom to have music accompany fireworks displays. The 1812 Overture is probably the song most often pressed into this service.

However, I came across this bit on Slate noting that famed fireworks expert Takeo Shimizu used musical notation to plan his luminous displays.

The pyrotechnics expert Takeo Shimizu used a musical score to represent his designs: Each stave corresponded to a different firing location, and each note represented a particular kind of shell fired at a particular time.

A symphony of sight and sound indeed!