RESEARCH ARTICLE Clustering Consumers Based on Trust, Confidence and Giving Behaviour: Data- Driven Model Building for Charitable Involvement in the Australian Not-For-Profit Sector

Organisations in the Not-for-Profit and charity sector face increasing competition to win time, money and efforts from a common donor base. Consequently, these organisations need to be more proactive than ever. The increased level of communications between indi-viduals and organisations today, heightens the need for investigating the drivers of charita-ble giving and understanding the various consumer groups, or donor segments, within a population. It is contended that `trust ' is the cornerstone of the not-for-profit sector's survival, making it an inevitable topic for research in this context. It has become imperative for chari-ties and not-for-profit organisations to adopt for-profit's research, marketing and targeting strategies. This study provides the not-for-profit sector with an easily-interpretable segmen-tation method based on a novel unsupervised clustering technique (MST-kNN) followed by a feature saliency method (the CM1 score). A sample of 1,562 respondents from a survey conducted by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission is analysed to reveal donor segments. Each cluster's most salient features are identified using the CM1 score. Furthermore, symbolic regression modelling is employed to find cluster-specific models t