The Digital Premium in Faith‐Based Fundraising Efficiency: Evidence From a National Survey of Thai Buddhist Temples

ABSTRACT

Research on fundraising efficiency in religious organizations has grown, yet the literature centers almost exclusively on Western Christian congregations, leaving Buddhist temples—dominant civil society institutions across Theravada Southeast and South Asia—largely unstudied. This study addresses that gap using Thailand as a case, leveraging a nationally representative survey of 9940 temples across all six regions. Applying stochastic frontier analysis, we estimate how efficiently temples convert inputs into donation revenue and identify the factors explaining the efficiency gap. Three findings emerge. First, Thai temples capture only about half of their potential donation revenue—a shortfall larger than in Western religious nonprofits—driven by limited technology adoption, organizational youth, and geographic peripherality. Second, ICT adoption is associated with substantially higher efficiency across differences in size, age, and subsidy dependence: computer use, internet access, and a social media presence are associated with 23.5%, 21.6%, and 11.3% higher efficiency scores, respectively. Third, government subsidies are associated with lower efficiency, consistent with reduced incentive for independent outreach and the Buddhist principle of sufficiency. As the data are cross‐sectional, these associations should not be read as causal; nonetheless, targeting ICT investment toward younger, peripheral temples appears a promising policy lever. For the philanthropy literature, the study offers the first frontier‐based efficiency evidence from a non‐Western, non‐Christian religious tradition, translating that evidence into an actionable metric—which we term the digital premium: the relative difference in predicted mean technical efficiency between ICT‐adopting and nonadopting temples, not a causal treatment effect—for prioritizing technology investment.