Examining the Priorities of the Smithsonian Institution's Giving Pledge Letters

Philanthropy; Communication Campaigns; Content Analysis; Nonprofit Sector

Research Mentor: Dr. but really prefer first name Richard Waters,
Department, College, Affiliation: School of Communication, Communication and Information
Contact Email: rdw22@fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:

Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors
Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required: No, the project is remote
Remote or In-person: Partially Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 5-10, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link: https://fsu.zoom.us/j/93786138126 on Sep 6, 2023, 05:00 PM Eastern Time

Project Description

This project involves reading the 75 Giving Pledge letters from the Smithsonian Institution critically to examine what the major philanthropic donors from around the world have as their nonprofit priorities. The project will require the students to work together with the professor to create the questions that will be used to analyze the letters. Questions, such as nonprofit missions stated, personal background of the donors and their pledge amounts, are likely to be ones that will me developed and entered into Qualtrics so they can be analyzed remotely. The students will ideally work on collecting the data in the Fall semester and putting together a research paper in the Spring semester for submission to an academic journal.

The student will mostly help with the literature review and data collection. I'll work with the student to develop research questions to analyze the Giving Pledge letters and devise a content analysis codebook to use in the analysis of the 2010-2023 letters. We will work on achieving interceder reliability by coding several letters together. When that is achieved students will work independently and remotely. An internet connection is needed to access the Giving Pledge Letters website and Qualtrics to analyze data. No special library training is required. I want students to work on the project in the areas that they wish to, as well. Data collection via coding the letters is a must, but if students want to help analyze data, I'm glad to help them learn those skills. I would
like to see the data collected by the end of January 2024 to allow us to write up results by mid-April.


Research Tasks: Literature Review, Data collection (content analysis), Data analysis if the student wants to learn basic statistics

Skills that research assistant(s) may need: The main thing that is needed is an interest in exploring what global philanthropists are focused on with their donations. This can be due to advancing personal career interests by better understanding technology company's social responsibility efforts, better understanding the nonprofit sector domestically and globally, or simply wanting to get a better visino of what the future of global philanthropy looks like.