Short-term experiential philanthropy: The case of Giving Games

ABSTRACT This article presents a case study on Giving Games (GG), which are single-session experiential philanthropy lessons where students learn about, deliberate, and decide which of a set of pre-planned nonprofit organizations should receive smaller sums of sponsored money. Findings reveal that participants’ prioritized considerations for giving changed between pre-GG and post-GG surveys, and that their considerations changed to align with pre-planned learning outcomes. Reflection on open-ended responses from the survey led to an emergent observation: that some learning outcomes in experiential philanthropy are general to the experience of researching any set of nonprofit organizations, and that some learning outcomes are specific to the nonprofits included in the experience. This observation supports the notion that experiential philanthropy can flexibly teach learning outcomes specific to different academic fields, settings, and philosophies. I also discuss backwards learning design and student-centered learning theories considering these findings.