Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.

精英捐助者是许多非营利组织的重要且抢手的资金来源，但缺乏实质性的实证研究来提供有关此类捐助者的动机、经验和观点的原始数据。社会科学家在与精英进行访谈时面临挑战，特别是：获得精英捐助者的机会；建立足够的融洽关系来讨论涉及金钱和道德的话题；理解数据，而不会被精英和非精英之间显着的表面差异所迷惑。这些障碍导致长期过度依赖二手资源以及对基金会工作人员和财富顾问等代理人的采访。本文回顾了一小部分工作，这些工作展示了对精英捐助者的采访结果，并借鉴了我对 46 位富有的英国捐助者进行采访的经验，以便批判性地分析这项研究设计的实施。本文通过扩展对精英捐助者同意接受采访的原因的理解来增加文献，并通过强调克服进行精英采访时遇到的挑战的策略来促进第三部门研究的发展，以便对背景、文化和他们研究重点的主观性。