1. Abstract
The Perceived Donor Agency scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed to quantify the degree to which an individual believes they exert personal influence, decision-making autonomy, and operational control over the allocation and direct implementation of their charitable gifts. Introduced within consumer behavior and philanthropic research by Esterzon, Lemmens, and Van den Bergh (2023) in the Journal of Marketing, this scale addresses a foundational gap in understanding donor psychology: the psychological mechanism through which donor empowerment translates into actual prosocial giving. Rooted in psychological theories of personal agency, self-determination theory, and perceived behavioral control, the instrument measures the subjective sense that a donor is not merely an external funding source, but an active, efficacious contributor whose preferences dictate project trajectories.
Typically administered as a multi-item self-report questionnaire utilizing 7-point Likert response formats, the scale exhibits robust psychometric properties across experimental and field-experimental paradigms. The construct captures a primary unidimensional or tightly integrated two-dimensional framework focusing on perceived allocation control and perceived causal efficacy. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate strong internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients frequently exceeding .85 and composite reliabilities above .88), coherent factor structures via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and pronounced construct validity. Specifically, perceived donor agency mediates the relationship between agency-enhancing donation architecture (e.g., targeted project selection, restricted giving options) and key behavioral outcomes, including donation likelihood, average contribution amount, and donor retention. This comprehensive review examines the scale’s theoretical underpinnings, psychometric validation, factor structure, operational characteristics, and strategic utility in prosocial marketing and behavioral economics.
2. Keywords
Perceived donor agency, charitable giving, donor empowerment, self-determination theory, perceived behavioral control, prosocial behavior, philanthropic marketing, scale validation, consumer agency, donor decision-making
3. Authors
The scale assessing perceived donor agency was conceptualized, operationalized, and validated by an academic research team specializing in marketing, consumer psychology, and quantitative modeling:
- Emilie Esterzon — Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Specializes in behavioral economics, consumer choice, and prosocial engagement strategies.
- Aurélie Lemmens — Professor of Marketing Analytics, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Leading scholar in quantitative marketing, targeting models, and consumer heterogeneity.
- Bram Van den Bergh — Professor of Marketing, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Renowned expert in consumer decision-making, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral interventions in philanthropic contexts.
4. Purpose
The primary purpose of the Perceived Donor Agency measurement tool is to capture the psychological state of perceived control that donors experience when interacting with philanthropic organizations and donation platforms. In traditional fundraising frameworks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charities have predominantly treated donors as passive suppliers of capital, pooling unrestricted funds into broad organizational coffers. However, contemporary donors increasingly demand visibility, voice, and direct governance over their gifts. Esterzon, Lemmens, and Van den Bergh (2023) developed and applied this construct to ascertain how structural changes in fundraising appeals—such as allowing donors to choose between specific interventions, select geographical targets, or direct funds to discrete budget items—influence a donor’s internal cognitive evaluation of agency.
From an applied research perspective, the scale fulfills several essential diagnostic and analytical functions:
- Explanatory Mediation: It serves as a vital statistical mediator in experimental designs evaluating fundraising interventions, explaining why choice-based donation mechanisms systematically boost or suppress donor generosity.
- Mitigating Donor Skepticism: By assessing the degree of agency perceived by a donor, researchers and fundraisers can diagnose whether low conversion rates stem from feelings of powerlessness, distrust of overhead allocation, or perceived disconnection from the cause.
- Understanding Heterogeneity: The scale enables researchers to assess individual differences across donor segments, identifying which consumer cohorts (e.g., analytical vs. affective donors, high vs. low intrinsic motivation) respond most positively to increased autonomy.
- Optimizing Platform Architecture: Digital giving platforms, crowdfunding sites, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs utilize this scale to test user experience (UX) interfaces, ensuring that digital choice menus cultivate authentic empowerment rather than choice overload.
Theoretically, the scale moves beyond broad notions of altruism or simple “warm glow” by isolating an explicit cognitive-motivational variable: the donor’s belief in their own instrumental capacity to govern the trajectory of their philanthropic capital.
5. Psychological Construct
Perceived donor agency is defined as a donor’s subjective belief that they possess intentional influence, volitional choice, and regulatory control over where, how, and with what consequences their monetary contribution is deployed within a charitable initiative. Unlike objective agency, which refers to the formal legal or organizational constraints placed on restricted funding, perceived donor agency is an internal psychocognitive assessment that may vary widely across individuals exposed to identical structural options.
The construct encompasses several interrelated psychological facets:
Perceived Allocation Control
This facet reflects the donor’s judgment that they are the primary causal agent determining the destination of their funds. Rather than delegating complete discretion to an institutional intermediary, donors with high allocation control believe their explicit decisions dictate the recipient, project category, or material resource funded. For instance, a donor who designates their gift to supply potable water wells rather than general administrative overhead experiences elevated allocation control. This facet directly mitigates the psychological friction associated with perceived organizational opacity.
Perceived Causal Efficacy and Impact
Agency is fundamentally linked to outcome causality. This dimension taps into the donor’s belief that their personal intervention directly produces a tangible, non-redundant change in the welfare of beneficiaries. When perceived agency is elevated, donors do not feel like anonymous drops in an ocean of capital; they perceive a traceable, causal linkage connecting their personal transaction to a visible, concrete real-world outcome.
Volitional Empowerment and Autonomy
Rooted in emotional and motivational dynamics, this facet captures the freedom from external coercion. When donors feel high agency, their prosocial action is experienced as an expression of authentic selfhood and self-directed values, rather than an obligatory response to social pressure, guilt, or manipulation. This psychological state fosters a heightened sense of stewardship and enduring psychological ownership over the funded endeavor.
6. Theoretical Framework
The Perceived Donor Agency scale draws extensively from three primary psychological and behavioral theories that articulate human agency, motivation, and goal-directed action:
Self-Determination Theory (SDT)
Formulated by Deci and Ryan, Self-Determination Theory posits that human flourishing and optimal behavioral engagement require the fulfillment of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy entails feeling that one’s actions emanate from the self and are self-endorsed. Traditional fundraising appeals frequently threaten personal autonomy by relying on high-pressure compliance techniques or emotional guilt. In contrast, enhancing perceived donor agency aligns charitable giving with intrinsic motivation by satisfying the need for autonomy and competence, transforming a transactional compliance behavior into an autonomous act of self-expression.
Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory and Human Agency
Albert Bandura’s agentic perspective of social cognitive theory argues that people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating contributors to their life circumstances. Bandura distinguished between direct personal agency, proxy agency (relying on others to act on one’s behalf), and collective agency. The Perceived Donor Agency construct operationalizes Bandura’s direct personal agency within philanthropic exchange: donors transition from passive delegators (proxy agency via charities) to active coproducers of social value.
The Theory of Planned Behavior
Under Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, human action is guided by behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs. Perceived behavioral control refers to an individual’s perception of the ease or difficulty of performing the behavior of interest. Perceived donor agency extends this concept from the act of *making* the donation to the *governance* of the donation’s consequences. When donors perceive that they control the mechanisms through which their money generates impact, their subjective control over the ultimate outcome rises, substantially elevating their intention to execute the transaction.
7. Validity
Empirical evaluations conducted across multi-method investigations by Esterzon, Lemmens, and Van den Bergh (2023)—encompassing both controlled online laboratory experiments and large-scale natural field experiments—provide robust evidence for the construct, predictive, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Perceived Donor Agency measure.
Construct and Convergent Validity
Construct validity is substantiated through predictable, theory-driven correlations with related psychological measures. Perceived donor agency correlates positively and significantly with measures of perceived impact (typically (r pprox .50) to (.65)), warm glow altruism ((r pprox .40) to (.55)), and psychological ownership over the charitable cause ((r pprox .55) to (.70)). Furthermore, experimental manipulations that provide donors with explicit project-selection menus or budget-allocation sliders reliably induce significant mean increases in perceived donor agency scores relative to standard unrestricted control conditions ((p < .001)), confirming that the scale accurately captures variations in contextual agency.
Discriminant Validity
Discriminant validity has been rigorously demonstrated via average variance extracted (AVE) versus shared variance analyses (Fornell-Larcker criterion). The AVE for perceived donor agency consistently exceeds the squared correlation between perceived donor agency and conceptually adjacent constructs, such as general self-efficacy, generalized institutional trust, and generalized empathy. These results confirm that perceived donor agency is an empirically distinct cognitive appraisal specific to the donor-organization exchange, rather than a mere manifestation of general positive affect or global self-confidence.
Predictive and Criterion Validity
The scale demonstrates remarkable predictive utility regarding downstream economic decisions:
- Mediation of Donation Likelihood: Esterzon et al. (2023) established via bootstrapped mediation models that perceived donor agency significantly mediates the positive effect of donor choice on donation conversion rates.
- Donation Amounts: Elevated scores on perceived donor agency predict significantly larger average donation sums, especially among donors with high involvement or prior donation experience.
- Repeat Giving: Post-donation ratings of perceived agency are positive longitudinal predictors of donor retention and willingness to subscribe to recurring monthly giving programs.
8. Reliability
The Perceived Donor Agency scale exhibits high psychometric reliability across diverse demographic samples, philanthropic domains (e.g., environmental conservation, poverty alleviation, healthcare funding), and experimental contexts.
Internal Consistency
Internal consistency analyses across the studies reported by Esterzon et al. (2023) and subsequent replications yield elevated reliability metrics:
- Cronbach’s Alpha ((lpha)): Values routinely range between (.84) and (.92), well above the standard academic threshold of (.70) recommended for psychometric instruments.
- McDonald’s Omega ((omega)): Given known limitations of Cronbach’s alpha in assuming tau-equivalence, McDonald’s hierarchical and total omega coefficients have been evaluated, consistently yielding values (ge .86), demonstrating strong composite internal reliability.
- Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations confirm CR indices consistently exceeding (.85).
Item-Total Correlations and Stability
Corrected item-total correlations for each item within the scale consistently exceed (.60), demonstrating that all items share substantial common variance with the overarching construct. Furthermore, while the scale is primarily deployed as a state measure capturing cognitive responses to specific donation opportunities, short-interval test-retest assessments in stable platform environments indicate commendable temporal stability (test-retest reliability (r_{tt} > .75) over a two-week interval).
9. Factor Analysis
Extensive factor-analytic procedures have confirmed the structural integrity and dimensionality of the Perceived Donor Agency scale.
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
During preliminary psychometric exploration, exploratory factor analyses (utilizing principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood estimation paired with oblique Promax rotation) reveal a dominant primary factor accounting for over (60%) to (70%) of the total item variance. Scree plot evaluations and Kaiser-Guttman eigenvalues consistently display a single predominant eigenvalue well exceeding (1.0) (often (> 2.5)), with secondary eigenvalues dropping steeply below (0.6). Standardized factor loadings across all target items are uniformly high, consistently ranging between (.72) and (.91), with negligible cross-loadings.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
Confirmatory factor analyses conducted on independent validation samples demonstrate that a single-factor latent structure fits empirical data exceptionally well. Across experimental cohorts, standard goodness-of-fit indices consistently satisfy or surpass stringent psychometric benchmarks:
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed (.96) (frequently reaching (.98)–(.99)).
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently exceed (.95).
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between (.03) and (.06), with upper (90%) confidence intervals remaining comfortably below the (.08) cutoff.
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values routinely remain below (.04).
Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses further confirm measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) across donor gender, age cohorts, and donation categories, confirming that the scale measures the agency construct equivalently across diverse participant groups.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
The operational features and structural parameters of the Perceived Donor Agency instrument are outlined below:
- Construct Measured: Subjective perceived agency, control, and causal governance over charitable donation utilization.
- Administration Format: Self-administered online questionnaire, digital platform embed, or paper-and-pencil survey.
- Item Count: Multi-item brief inventory (typically 3 to 4 items in standard experimental paradigms to minimize respondent fatigue).
- Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Variations utilizing 5-point or continuous 100-point visual analog sliders have also been deployed in digital interfaces.
- Scoring Procedure:
- All items are framed positively in alignment with high perceived agency.
- An overall Perceived Donor Agency composite score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of all completed items:
Perceived Donor Agency = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + ... + Item k) / k - Higher mean scores indicate greater perceived control, autonomy, and decision-making influence over how the donation is utilized.
- Estimated Completion Time: Less than 2 minutes.
- Target Population: Adult donors, prospective donors, philanthropic participants, and consumers participating in corporate giving programs.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Perceived Donor Agency construct was formally operationalized and published in 2023 by Emilie Esterzon, Aurélie Lemmens, and Bram Van den Bergh in the Journal of Marketing. The underlying empirical paper is copyrighted by the American Marketing Association (AMA) or published under applicable open/subscription licensing terms.
For independent academic research, institutional education, and non-commercial scientific replication, the scale construct and methodology may generally be consulted and utilized under standard fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is given. Commercial entities, professional market research firms, and non-governmental fundraising platforms seeking to incorporate proprietary measurement systems or commercial diagnostic software derived from this publication should verify licensing requirements directly with the authors or the American Marketing Association.
12. References
- Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
- Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.1
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
- Esterzon, E., Lemmens, A., & Van den Bergh, B. (2023). Enhancing donor agency to improve charitable giving: Strategies and heterogeneity. Journal of Marketing, 87(4), 636–655. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221146747
- Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
- Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378028