Generation Impact

APPENDIXMethods and Data

The candid reflections and insights in this book come from individuals in their 20s and 30s with a capacity for high‐level giving now or in the future, many of whom have never before shared their thoughts on philanthropy. Data from these donors comes from an online survey and in‐depth, semistructured interviews, and our analysis of this data is based on our combined 40 years of experience in the philanthropic field.

Despite their power to control big giving and a range of social causes for decades to come, there has been surprisingly little research—good or bad—on Gen X and Millennial major donors. We know a bit about giving and philanthropic attitudes among rising generational cohorts overall but less specifically about those people within the cohorts who have the capacity for major giving. And we have some good data on high‐net‐worth donors in general, but this data is rarely parsed and analyzed in depth by age cohorts.

Because of this, our project was designed from the beginning to be more inductive than deductive, more about asking exploratory and open‐ended questions than about testing hypotheses. We also had a distinctly applied orientation, knowing that we wanted our findings to be of direct help to both this population of next gen donors and those who work closely with them. These aspects of our approach influenced our research questions, methods, data collection, analysis, and presentation of the results.

This book builds on a research report ...