Being kind with in-kind donations
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Charities and nonprofits with retail stores must walk a fine line when accepting in-kind donations from the public.
If they turn away items they can’t use, they could appear ungrateful. But if they accept everything dropped off, they will lose money and use their limited resources on time, fuel and the cost of disposal.
Is there an intervention that could help remedy this pressing issue as we head into the holiday season?
Arizona State University’s Mahyar Eftekhar, an associate professor of supply chain management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, and two associatesOthers who partnered in this study include Sindy De La Torre Pacheco, director of operations and analytics at St. Vincent de Paul, and Chao Wu, former ASU doctoral student and now an assistant professor of supply chain management at Wayne State University. conducted a field experiment in 2020 with the Phoenix chapter of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a charity that helps low-income people. The trio implemented a "social norm" intervention wherein Saint Vincent de Paul conveyed to potential donors that most people only donate items in good condition. The idea is that because humans are inclined to follow social norms, people would take that information into consideration when deciding what to donate — and hopefully choose to only donate usable items.
Nearly four years later, their findings have been released in a new study titled “Improving the Quality of In-Kind Donations: A Field Experiment,” which educates donors on the costs of unusual donations.
ASU News spoke with Eftekhar about their intervention and how you can help improve in-kind donations this holiday season and beyond.
Editor's note: The following interview has been edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: How did you come up with the idea for your in-kind donations study, and what motivated you to complete it?
Answer: The issue of low-quality in-kind donations is a well-known problem in both charity work and disaster response operations. Unfortunately, many people donate items they no longer need, assuming someone else will find them useful. This is why, after disasters, many response agencies struggle with the challenge of disposing of useless in-kind donations. I was already collaborating with St. Vincent de Paul Phoenix on another project when one of their managers, Sindy De La Torre Pacheco, brought up the issue of in-kind donations. With her help, we were able to complete this research.
Q: What was your most interesting finding?
A: What I found most interesting is that people follow social norms much more easily than they process information and act on it. It’s just easier for us to understand and go along with norms — it feels natural. ... Saint Vincent de Paul simply informed their donors that “the majority of donors give us items that are in very good condition and have a high likelihood of being sold at our thrift stores around the Valley.”
Q: What was the tangible result of implementing your intervention?
A: Thanks to the St. Vincent de Paul crew, who did a fantastic job with implementing the intervention and collecting the data, estimates show that the social norm intervention reduced unusable donations received by St. Vincent de Paul by 50%, leading to substantial savings without additional costs.
Q: Can the same method you’ve used in these studies tackle other societal issues?
So what can I donate?
According to nonprofit thrift stores, items that they can use include gently used or like-new:
• Clothing.
• Furniture.
• Small appliances.
• Toys.
• Books.
Items that have to be disposed of include:
• Stained clothing.
• Torn blankets.
• Broken furniture.
• Used children’s car seats or cribs.
• Used mattress or box spring.
A: Absolutely! Together with a colleague from MIT Sloan, Professor Karen Zheng, her doctoral student and a field partner in Ghana, doctorate Richard Boso, I worked on implementing two behavioral interventions to reduce food waste in restaurant kitchens in Ghana. The study was a great success — our results showed that these interventions could cut food waste by 9 to 19%. That’s a significant impact, especially when you consider that just a 15% reduction in food waste in Ghana could help feed 7 million people in the country.
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