An assessment of bereaved supporters' expectations and experiences of giving via digital memorial sites

This project aims to explore the creation of digital content via charities as a memorialising practice. It will answer the following questions:
1. Why do bereaved people give to charities in remembrance of a deceased person by creating an online memorial?
2. How were their expectations of this ritual fulfilled or disappointed in their actual experience?
3. What is the role and experience of charities in providing this service, and how might practise need to change to meet the needs of bereaved supporters?
In-memoriam giving in the UK is valued at approximately £2.2 billion, and it is growing steadily at 2.5% per annum. Digital forms of such giving - such as creating digital memorials by making one-off cash donations or peer-to-peer fundraising - accelerated during the pandemic.
This bereavement ritual seems set to stay, but currently very little is known about in-memoriam giving online, in terms of the experience for bereaved people, the benefit derived from such sites, and the management of the sites by charities.
Various hypotheses as to how in-memoriam giving might aid bereaved people have been proposed. These include: by locating the deceased person in the (ongoing) world, by continuing relationships and communication with the deceased and by creating a sense of 'symbolic immortality' for the deceased person. To date, there has been no systematic review of these hypotheses and little, if any, of the existing research has spoken to bereaved people to understand their experiences.
In seeking empirical evidence to critique these hypotheses, this PhD study will make a novel contribution to the field of death studies, charity practice, and digital transformation as it captures the voices, values and views of bereaved online donors for the first time.
In terms of impact and real-world utility, this project will provide charities with practical guidelines and standards about the development and management of digital sites for bereaved people. Utility will be maximised by the innovative methodology of this project.
This project is in all likelihood the first co-creative collaboration between charity fundraisers and an academic researcher. An advisory board, made up of in-memoriam fundraisers from a wide range of charities (in terms of cause, size and region), will guide every stage of the project, including supporting the recruitment of interview participants, shaping the conversation guide for the semi-structured interviews, reviewing early findings from the thematic analysis and critiquing the best practice guidelines to ensure they are applicable to charities. By taking a participatory approach, this project will increase charity buy-in to implementing necessary changes to their practise, thereby maximising benefit to bereaved people using digital memorial websites.
Additionally, this project will further the usage of digital tools within academic research into social policy and practise. All the semi-structured interviews will be conducted online. These interviews will also include an element of digital ethnography, as participants will be invited to revisit the process of creating a digital memorial enabling increased understanding of their behaviours and emotions during the creative process. All interviews, with the informed consent of participants, will be recorded and compilation videos of key themes will be embedded into the thesis to ensure the research findings are maximally accessible and impactful for charity fundraisers. This will further increase the likelihood that changes are made to improve the experience of bereaved charity supporters.