Raising money for a charity? Don't bark up the wrong tree.

Dog owners are often associated with personality traits of being social and community-oriented while "cat people" are often thought of as introverted and more open-minded, according to prior research.

But if you're about to raise money for a charity from people with pets, you may want to think about the strategy.

A new Dartmouth study finds that cat owners donate slightly more than dog owners, and also donate more often and more diversely. However, people without pets donate the most.

The findings are published in the journal Anthrozoӧs.

To examine philanthropic behavior by pet ownership, including how personality traits may come into play, the study looked at approximately 63 million donors and 788 million transactions, totaling nearly $70 billion over a 10-year period between 2013 and 2022. The data was obtained from the cloud-computing management company Snowflake.

The study assessed donation amounts between $20 and $100,000 and their frequency, along with the age, gender, race, marital status, number of children, income, education, and partisanship of the donors. 

To capture the intricate relationships between the categorical features, a machine learning model called CatBoost, which stands for categorical boosting, was used.
 

Prior research in psychology has shown that openness is often correlated with higher levels of giving. If some cat owners are in fact more open and more neurotic than dog owners, these personality traits may have been a contributing factor to explain the recent study's results, including why cat people gave more and did so more often.

"My research shows how pet ownership reflects complex personality differences, even when it comes to philanthropy," says study author Herbert Chang ’18, an assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth. "They're not huge divergences, but they are meaningful and reflect everyday intuitions toward dog and cat owners."

Chang says that the differences in donation behavior in both amount and frequency could be useful for marketers as they work to identify and reach target audiences for charitable campaigns.

Chang is available for comment at: herbert.chang@dartmouth.edu.

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