Brazil and Charitable Giving: The Role of Antecedents of Trust in Donations to Voluntary Organisations

The features of the voluntary sector around the world are very diverse, while some countries have high percentages of the population as donors, in others such as Brazil this number is not so expressive. A variety of studies have presented trust in organisations as an important factor for the individuals’ willingness to donate to charity organisations. Could it be a lack of trust in the voluntary sector and its organisations that holds Brazilians back from donating? The aim of this research is to establish which antecedents of trust in voluntary organisations are relevant to individuals’ intention to donate to charitable organisations. This study objective is to explore the antecedents of trust – attitudes towards philanthropy, familiarity, perceived ability, perceived integrity, perceived benevolence – by testing those that most influence the willingness to donate of university graduates in Brazil. This paper proposes to do this through the application of an online questionnaire (survey) applied to university graduates in Brazil. The research design of this study consists of deductive research, in which hypotheses were formulated based on the literature on antecedents of trust in the voluntary sector and charitable giving. These hypotheses were tested from a quantitative methodological approach using statistical techniques, such as multiple linear regressions and mediation, through the SPSS and PROCESS software. The results indicate that the antecedents of trust are not directly good predictors of the intention to donate to voluntary organisations. Among the factors studied, familiarity was the one that stood out as the most relevant to explaining the willingness to donate, which may be closely related to the context setting (Brazil and Latin America). Therefore, interesting conclusions are drawn up, including how important it is for fundraisers to work towards making people familiar with the charity sector, its causes and organisations. Ultimately, further research is needed to explore other non-trust-related factors that may increase the number of donors to voluntary organisations in Brazil. Key words: Voluntary organisations; trust; intention to donate; antecedents of trust.