Why New Zealanders donate money and who they give it to – and how tools like Givealittle are changing the giving landscape.

Is New Zealand really a generous country? It’s difficult to quantify. Giving to registered charities can be counted through tax returns, but giving to overseas causes, giving money to friends or family, or giving cash is much harder to count. While New Zealand will occasionally pop up in reports as the second-most generous country per capita, the latest edition of the comprehensive CAF Giving Index places New Zealand at 17, well behind Australia (#8), the US (#6), Ukraine (#7) and Indonesia (#1, for the seventh consecutive year).  

“New Zealand has more than 27,000 registered charities, which is a lot,” says Rahul Watson Govindan, chief executive of Philanthropy New Zealand. For comparison, Singapore, a similarly sized country (#3 on the Giving Index) has just 2,400 government-registered charities. Most of New Zealand’s charities aren’t big organisations with dozens of staff; Govindan says the bulk of money that gets given away goes to the top 10 or 20 largest charities, like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, St Johns and the Cancer Society. “That means there’s a long list of 26,000 charitable entities that don’t have much funding at all.” 

Against the backdrop of a cost of living crisis and rising unemployment in New Zealand right now, what persuades people to give money away? After all, many simply don’t – although they may contribute in other ways, like volunteering time or donating food to good causes. 

“A lot of people give out of a sense of connection with others,” Govindan says. Personal appeals demonstrate this: you’re more likely to give money to the kid next door’s football trip than to a child you’ve never met, or a charitable sports organisation in a country you don’t live in. Schemes like sponsoring a child, where charities like World Vision organise photos and messages from children to go to donors, create more of a sense of connection too. 

When you donate money, you’re not receiving a particular good or service in return, but something more nebulous. “I hear lots of people say it makes them more aware of the community they live in, their wealth,” Govindan says. 

Giving money away “makes me feel that I can do good in the world, that I have something I believe in”, says Caroline, who has previously worked in the social sector and seen some of the challenges people in her community face (and requested for her last name not to be used). To draw on a sense of personal connection, last Christmas her gift to her three nieces was paying for a safe night for someone at the women’s refuge. “No one in my immediate family has needed the services of the women’s refuge, but thinking about an equity approach made me want to give, because many people do need it.” 

While she’s “no saint”, giving money away reminds her of her moral compass, that she doesn’t need to simply accumulate money for assets herself. She’s chosen to live in a smaller house, and has older cars than many neighbours. “I think ‘how much new stuff do we need’?” she says.

Alana*, a mum living in a small town, didn’t see much giving when she was growing up. “I don’t think my parents gave money away at all – we were really poor, and had a ‘we need it for us’ mindset,” she says. Since she left home and started managing her own money, she has consistently set aside about 10% of her earnings, including a percentage of all sales from her business, to give away. “I feel like it would be harder to give away money if I had more of it, because 10% is a bigger amount,” she says. “I started giving money away when I had less – if I was used to extensive lifestyle funds, or had a bigger mortgage, I wouldn’t have given so much away.” 

Talking about how much money you give away may feel like boasting, but can be an encouragement to others. “Many people have never considered donating because we don’t have a culture of talking about it,” says Rowan Clements, chair of Effective Altruism New Zealand, an organisation and charitable trust that aims to identify the most effective ways of doing good. “We normalised not needing plastic shopping bags at the supermarket – so maybe we could do the same for donating money?” says Caroline. She wonders whether budgeting services like Sorted could mention budgeting for money to give away. 

The changing face of giving

Caroline gives money to campaigns on crowdfunding platform Givealittle – where anyone can set up a funding campaign with a set goal of how much is needed – although it’s a smaller percentage compared to money she donates to formal charities. She’s particularly compelled by individual stories of people “being screwed over by fate”; having multiple tragedies overlap into a desperate situation. Having gone through many painful medical procedures, she also has “weird emotional moments”, where she wants to help people encountering difficulties with their house. 

Unlike with standard, registered charities, there is no tax rebate for donating to personal Givealittle campaigns or similar platforms (like Gofundme, as well as the more business-focused PledgeMe and Kickstarter, although arts-focused Boosted does provide a rebate through the Arts Foundation, and some registered charities use Givealittle and provide a rebate for donations). There is also no accountability or transparency about how the money is spent, although fundraisers may post updates. “Givealittle is really successful for a one-off need,” says Govindan. “You’ve seen this young child who needs a lifesaving operation to fly somewhere to the world, it’ll be on Seven Sharp and before you know it they’re funded and off you go.” says Govindan. But the transparency of having your name publicly attached to a donation – donors can leave a public message alongside their name – can be a big motivator. 

At the same time, directly giving money to people can make a big, immediate difference that often isn’t seen when donating to larger charities. Govindan points out that this is a big part of the appeal of individual fundraising. “If you put a dollar in someone’s bucket, you can’t track where it goes. But with a Givealittle, you can understand how your bit makes a difference to every other bit. You can see how close you are to the goal.” There’s an egalitarian spirit to the enterprise, even if it is a technology platform funded by an estate planning business, and which takes a 5% fee on all transactions. 

But while giving money to someone in dire straits allows you to know that your money will be used by someone in need, it can’t change the bigger picture that may have placed that person in that circumstance. Many people might be willing to donate to a new children’s hospital – but less likely to support better primary care, poverty relief or nutrition causes that might keep kids out of hospital in the first place.

While platforms like Givealittle have a place, the framework of effective altruism asks of charitable giving, “how do we make this money go furthest?”. Borrowing from the logic of businesses, it replaces “return on investment” with “doing the most good possible”. For instance, $30,000 spent on someone’s experimental cancer treatment could extend one person’s lifespan. But $30,000 spent on cheap treated bed nets could also prevent hundreds of people from getting malaria, a completely preventable disease which infected 263 million people in 2023 and killed more than 500,000. “We ask: how do you do the most good, with your money or your time?” Clements says. Some effective altruists “earn to give”, figuring that a high salary working at a tech startup means lots of money to give away, which could potentially do more good than simply working for a better cause, like global health. 

Inevitably, the desire to justify the effectiveness of a donation can lead to some absurd calculations. How do you compare, for example, $4 spent on a bed net with $4 spent on pandemic preparedness, another hot EA cause? After all, when a pandemic strikes, you don’t get to run an alternate version of events, to see how much worse it would have been if, say, high-quality masks or virus sequencing had been harder to access. It’s reasonable to focus on diseases with known prevention and treatment available, like malaria or tuberculosis, over complex forms of cancer which already receive lots of research funding. But how do you weigh the immaterial benefits of something like, say, funding to teach children their indigenous language, or to restore an adored mosque, or a few more precious years with someone you love? “There’s a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations – we know it’s not fully accurate, but it’s better than saying ‘we can’t quantify good, so let’s not bother,’” Clements says.

Many of these gnarly questions are hotly debated on the global Effective Altruism forum, which can at times feel like it is populated by people who are more motivated by assigning interesting statistical probabilities to events than engaging deeply and personally with violence and suffering experienced by animals and people alike. The ideology has received particular scrutiny following the fraud trial of one-time cryptocurrency magnate and EA adherent Sam Bankman-Freid. But some of the broader points are harder to refute: that money given in places where basic needs like healthcare is inaccessible can make an enormous difference. “If my money and resources can do more good for someone far away than someone close, it seems unfair not to help someone far away just because they happen to be far away,” Clements says. 

Yet for many people, feeling connected to their community is a key reason to donate money. Caroline is passionate about food sovereignty and access to quality kai, so she donates to a local organic farming project. She also feels angry that the New Zealand government has done a “piss poor job” during the ongoing crisis in Palestine, so she has recently donated to causes supporting children’s who have lost family in the Gaza war. 

Alana, who has young kids – including a baby she has to pick up and comfort during our interview – often donates to people who have experienced baby loss and miscarriage, and Bellyful, which supports new parents with meals. 

Financial incentives to give more

Both Alana and Caroline rarely bother to fill out the tax return form to get a 33% rebate on their donation. “I’m financially lazy – it doesn’t seem worth it to declare it on a tax return,” says Caroline. Alana says that “if you got the rebate straight away, rather than compiling the receipts, that would be nice”. Govindan, though, thinks a better rebate would encourage more people to give money away; Singapore, for example, gives people $2.5 back for every dollar they spend on government-approved charities, with an easy mechanism to donate that money to charities too. “If we had that in New Zealand, it could make an immeasurable difference to charitable giving,” he says. 

Clements, meanwhile, is thinking about efficiency. “Tax deductibility does encourage donations, but I’m not sure if increasing [the rebate] would make a huge difference,” she says. If the process of claiming a tax rebate on donations were more straightforward, and could be done at the time of a donation, rather than having to amass and photograph various receipts to file at the end of the tax year, perhaps more people would donate. 

Caroline would be reluctant to give to a charity where much of the money was going to overheads and operational costs, or paying people to solicit more donations, rather than directly to people in need. Yet charities still need to employ staff and pay them fairly, and higher salaries to retain people with knowledge and expertise could be worth more than having to repeatedly train new people. “Whether it’s laying traps in the bush or supporting people with mental [ill] health, this work isn’t easy – it requires dedication and training, people need to be paid appropriately,” Govindan says. 

Above all, Clements says, giving to charity can reinforce a knowledge of one’s relative fortune. “If you have an average salary in New Zealand, even if you feel that you don’t have much money, you are in the top 1 or 2% of wealthiest income earners in the world.” 

Even when she feels that she doesn’t have much money, Alana thinks the discipline of giving money away is valuable. “I often feel an expectation that ‘I’ll give you this if you pay me back – but if you only give to people who you think can pay you back, society wouldn’t work. It’s possible to help someone without the expectation of anything in return, and what goes around comes around in a broader sense.”

*name changed to protect privacy

For more of The Spinoff’s coverage of how New Zealanders use money today, read The Cost of Being, published every Tuesday and Friday mornings.