The Motivation of the Participants in Charitable Events: Altruism or Social Recognition?

Abstract

When we ask „Why do people attend events?” one of the main factors which influence this kind of decision is represented by motivation. This intern engine can be structured in a very simple way with simple motivations, but it can also be full of complexity since a cluster of motivations can influence the decision in the same time. This aspect gets more complicated when the event has a charitable component. We must analyze in this case why do people donate, if they do it differently in a context like a public event and what are the motivations of choosing one event rather than another. At a first glance we tend to assign altruism for helping behaviour which is done in private and social recognition for people who donate in public. Actually it is more complicated than that since the intrinsic motivation can also be selfish even it is private. There are also eight mechanisms which influence people to donate and altruism and social recognition are just two of them. The main subject of this research is represented by charitable sport events. This type of events is different from simple charitable ones because people not only give money for a social cause, but they also make a physical effort, they get involved for the cause at a higher level and in this case motivations can also differ. This paper includes a research on a local charitable half marathon event where I wanted to find out what are the motivations which influenced people to participate to that event, to what extent they differ between first time participants and the participants who have been there more than once and if these motivations are closer to altruism or to social recognition.