Short-term experiential philanthropy: The case of Giving Games

ABSTRACT

This article presents a case study on Giving Games (GG), which are single-session experiential philanthropy lessons where students learn about, deliberate, and decide which of a set of pre-planned nonprofit organizations should receive smaller sums of sponsored money. Findings reveal that participants’ prioritized considerations for giving changed between pre-GG and post-GG surveys, and that their considerations changed to align with pre-planned learning outcomes. Reflection on open-ended responses from the survey led to an emergent observation: that some learning outcomes in experiential philanthropy are general to the experience of researching any set of nonprofit organizations, and that some learning outcomes are specific to the nonprofits included in the experience. This observation supports the notion that experiential philanthropy can flexibly teach learning outcomes specific to different academic fields, settings, and philosophies. I also discuss backwards learning design and student-centered learning theories considering these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Backwards learning design
• experiential philanthropy
• philanthropy education
• philosophy of philanthropy

Acknowledgement

Thank you to The Life You Can Save for collaborating and collecting the data used in this analysis. Thank you to Jon Behar of The Life You Can Save for helpful comments in shaping this paper. Anyone interested in running a Giving Game in their class can email [email protected].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics

This study qualified as exempt and was approved as one that would not involve more than minimal risk to participants by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Wyoming. Protocol #20190513GT02399.

Notes

1. Of course, civic engagement is a broad, umbrella term that means different things to different people. For some, civic engagement could mean voting, for others volunteering, for others advocacy, and still for others donating to nonprofits. It could also mean being engaged at a variety of levels from local, state, national, or global perspectives. This is not a problem necessarily, as civic engagement generally ties together any activity related to public service. So, on its own, the term ‘civic engagement’ does not provide any clarity for people who want to engage in public service but may not know what to do or how to get involved. However, the learning outcome of wanting to engage more civically after participating in experiential philanthropy is something that is possible regardless of which nonprofits are included in the experience.

2. This is also not to say that the variable of strategy/tactics may not enter into the discussion in Scenario 1, but discussing it will be complicated by the variable of philosophy/values that inevitably will be part of the discussion with a disparate set of cause areas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabel Taggart

Gabel Taggart is an assistant professor in the Master of Public Administration program in the School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies at the University of Wyoming