Charitable behaviour of UK Muslims: the role of donor value, charity reputation/dynamism and congruency on behavioural intentions

This research aims to understand the dynamics involved in the donor-charities interaction and focuses on the important drivers of charitable behaviour specifically on Sadaqah donations in the context of Muslims in the West. This is because the normative context to donate may vary for Muslims living in Islamic countries and Muslims living in non-Islamic countries. Therefore, this study expands the limited research on individuals’ voluntary donation to an underrepresented culture and focuses on UK’s ethnic minority faith-based group. While a few studies have addressed the factors driving other Islamic financial instruments such as Zakat (Kashif et al., 2018), this is the first study to empirically test the antecedents of UK Muslims’ Sadaqah donations. Sadaqah is a voluntary act, can be given at any time; it has no designated recipients and no fixed donation amount, which is different from Zakat (obligatory, paid once a year, amount is fixed and has designated for eight categories of recipients) (Al-Qardawi 1999; Kroessin, 2007). Since Sadaqah has limited guidelines, it makes it more difficult for charities to understand why, where, and to whom Muslims would give their Sadaqah. This research integrates individual aspects (donor value), organisational aspects (reputation/dynamism, congruency, and barriers to donating), cultural aspects (collectivism– individualism) and religious aspects (religiosity) that influence charitable giving outcomes. Instead of relying solely on intention to give Sadaqah as the outcome variable of interest, this research broadens the outcome variables to include donor commitment, loyalty and positive WOM—collectively referred to as non-monetary consequences. This study employed two phases of data collection, which involved twenty-one in-depth interviews and 406 self-administrated questionnaires. The findings revealed that participants mostly donated to emergency and disaster relief as well as charitable causes related to children, orphans and poor. Participants choose to support charities that are reputable, possess the image of dynamism and have high congruency with their self-concept. Additionally, congruency is found to mediate the relationship between reputation/dynamism and behavioural intentions. The findings suggest various value dimensions that participants seek from charitable giving including positive and negative emotional value, social value that are group-related driven (communal value) and religious belief value, which consequently have a positive and significant effect on behavioural intentions. The findings also revealed the positive effect of identity-based constructs (collectivism and religiosity) on donor value. This research opens new doors in investigating Muslims’ charitable behaviour in the West and contribute to the limited studies on Islamic instruments of voluntary giving, Sadaqah. This research is particularly important for charities that wish to tailor fundraising campaigns to fit UK Muslim donors. This research suggest that charities should focus on creating and delivering multi-dimensional value and invest in developing, managing and nurturing their reputation, image of dynamism and donor-charity congruency to establish continued support in the future (i.e. long-term donors). Keywords: charitable behaviour, Sadaqah, donor value, religiosity, congruency, UK Muslims, reputation/dynamism, individualism–collectivism, behavioural intentions