Disintermediated giving happens when people give directly to recipients/beneficiaries instead of giving to a charity or other nonprofit organisation. Charities have therefore been ‘disintermediated’ from (cut out of) the giving transaction.

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Disintermediation is something that is well understood in a business context, where it was first developed – for example, booking a holiday directly with a property’s owner without going through a travel agent. In a business context, disintermediation is understood to happen digitally.

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It is less well understood in the charity/fundraising context, where it is mostly conceived of as various forms of crowdfunding.

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But not only are there many other ways that charities can be disintermediated from the giving process; there are also other areas from which charities can be disintermediated. For example, charities/NPOs can be cut out of both service provision and fundraising.

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Disintermediation also raises ethical and regulatory issues that have barely begun to be researched.

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The aim of this Rogare project – on which Kingston University Business School is partnering us – is to provide a better and more robust conceptualisation of what disintermediation means in the charity sector. We have set out to answer these four questions:

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1. What is disintermediation/disintermediated giving? What categorisations/definitions are needed?

2. What do we know about it; what don’t we know – where are the knowledge gaps?

3. What challenges, particularly ethical ones, are thrown up by disintermediation of giving and asking, and how can we meet/overcome them?

4. How can charities make disintermediated giving work for/with them? 

 

The first step – answering question 1 and shining a light on questions 2 and 3 – has been to devise a new typology of disintermediation in the charity sector, which has been published in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing. 

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You can see a graphical version of the typology on this page. For an overview, check out our news item on Critical Fundraising. For a full understanding, including how it points to unexamined regulatory and ethical issues, see the JPM paper. We’ll be turning this into a shorter Rogare paper shortly.