Overview

• Published in Anthrozoös, the study examined roughly 63 million donors and nearly $70 billion in gifts from 2013 to 2022.
• Across the period, average giving per donor was $1,060 for non-pet owners (11 gifts), $780 for cat owners (15), $700 for dog owners (13), and $630 for owners of both cats and dogs (14).
• Researchers analyzed donations between $20 and $100,000 and accounted for age, gender, race, marital status, children, income, education, and partisanship.
• A CatBoost machine-learning model was used to capture relationships among categorical features in the donation data.
• The authors describe the differences as small yet meaningful for fundraising segmentation, and they note that personality-based explanations are suggested by prior research rather than proven by this study.