Parents’ Volunteerism Has Big Impact on Kids’ Charity Choices, Study Says

Shared experiences play a big role in determining whether children and grandchildren follow in their elders’ footsteps when it comes to giving, according to a new study.

The findings from the report on three generations and their philanthropy should signal to charities the importance of creating volunteer and other experiences, such as events and site visits, that give whole families an opportunity to get to know their cause.

For every 1-percent increase in a parent’s incidence of volunteering, their children’s odds of volunteering increased by 0.8 percent, and their odds of donating grew by 0.7 percent.

Volunteerism has a “spillover effect,” says Una Osili, director of research at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, which conducted the study with Vanguard Charitable. “Nonprofits need to think about how you build relationships not only with individuals but with families.”

Researchers analyzed data from the Lilly School’s ongoing Philanthropy Panel Study, which has surveyed some 8,000 families every two years for more than a decade. Those findings were supplemented by interviews with a handful of clients of Vanguard, which offers donor-advised funds.

Among the findings:

• Fifty-one percent of families for which all three generations were included in the study gave to charity; among high-net worth families, the figure was 78 percent.
• Thirty-two percent of all individuals said they volunteer, compared with half of all high-net worth individuals.
• Members of Generation X — born between 1965 and 1980 — were most likely to volunteer (36 percent). Millennials, born in 1981 or later, were least likely to give their time, with 24 percent saying they did so.
• Only 16 percent of millennials gave to religious causes, compared with 40 percent of baby boomers and 46 percent of older people.
• While more than three in four people of all ages said they preferred to leave their estates to family members, the second-most common choice among grandparents was leaving bequests to religious organizations. Among subsequent generations, secular charities were the second choice.

Role Models

The data revealed greater correlation in the patterns of giving by parents and their children than by grandparents and their grandchildren.

Parents and their adult children give in similar proportions to the arts, environmental groups, international organizations, and religious causes, according to the study. Shared experiences, such as attending concerts together, may help set the stage for a child’s support of a cause as an adult, suggests Ms. Osili.

This can present a challenge to groups whose causes don’t easily lend themselves to such all-ages participation, she acknowledges. In such cases, Ms. Osili says, charities “need to be more intentional about having those experiences for families.”

For example, grandparents’ support of charities that serve vulnerable people’s basic needs was less likely to translate into gifts by their grandchildren. For every 1 percent increase in grandparents’ support of basic-needs organizations, the odds of their grandchildren following suit decreased by 0.4 percent.

The report’s authors suggest that the times in which many of today’s grandparents grew up may have had some impact on that trend. “Their grandchildren, having not experienced widespread scarcity, do not prioritize giving to such basic-needs organizations,” the authors write, signaling an interest in further research on the findings.

However, Ms. Osili thinks a lack of shared experiences as volunteers may play a role. “There aren’t many opportunities for the grandparents to share those experiences,” she says. To convey their philanthropic values, she suggests, older donors might consider taking their grandchildren along on site visits to charities they support that serve vulnerable people.