Just as many people would only donate to organizations where they can be anonymous. For example, if you were a gay man and wanted to send money to Russia to help fight the anti-gay sentiment over there, you might not want to do it with your name easily traceable.
It’s not particularly difficult to make a donation anonymous in a way that the recipient genuinely doesn’t know who made the donation. Just have a neutral third party handle it. This could be a donor advised fund or a trustee, for example. I suspect this isn’t particularly rare.
Any charitable donation with your name on it is a Veblen good that (hopefully) becomes socially useful. If people donated out of a genuine sense of charity they would donate anonymously.
Many people give money in a functionally anonymous way. Sure, it might be traceable, but if I go online and donate $100 to the red cross:
1) They might know my name, but they don't really know who I am
2) I don't really get any social status bump for doing this, unless I go around telling people that I made this donation (in which case, i'd agree, it's not really anonymous anymore)
I don't think that works in practice. If you donate money with the goal of advancing some agenda, and it's officially anonymous, you'll find a way of letting the right people know it was you.
That could be done in a totally anonymous way. Add up total number of donations and total number of visits and distribute money accordingly. There is no need for them to ever store personal information for this.
I'd be a lot more willing to make political donations if I could do it anonymously: not because I care who knows what causes or politicians I support, but because I'm thoroughly sick of the relentless barrages of begging spam you call down on yourself by ever so much as breathing a hint of generosity toward any party-affiliated political operation.
I'd put cash in a bucket at a campaign event, but no way will I ever again use an online donation form.
To me the danger sign is that, if you’re doing anonymous donations properly, it would be impossible to solicit them. I mean, you wouldn’t know who to talk to! If the donor visits the institution, it’s just some random person with no reason for special treatment.
If there was an arms-length “anonymous fund” that people could donate to without even the development department knowing who they are, that would be the only way to have truly anonymous donations. And then I think the moral argument would make perfect sense.
And of all the ones that aren't anonymous, many many of them are only known to the recipient and the giver. If I give $30 to someone, just because I haven't anonymized it doesn't mean I think the world at large will know. I'm not sharing a list of my charitable giving with my friends, and I don't know many people who do trumpet their small-dollar donations.
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