Fundraising wisdom

Take in a Saturday matinee or put in a shift at the soup kitchen? Buy a louder sound system or donate a bigger chunk to charity? Inhale a box of Fruity Pebbles or fletcherize a bowl of bran? The ancient struggle between what we want to do and what we should do besets our species at every turn. And in the clinch, virtue often loses to desire.

The fall issue of the Standford Social Innovation review has a nice piece of research, useful to fundraisers (but unfortunately only available to subscribers):

Don’t make them act now, but later

Researchers Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman have discovered a way to help people choose their shoulds and not their wants. Its actually quite simple: don’t make them act now, but later. 

When you give people the opportunity to make binding choices that will go into effect in the future … they are much more likeley to do what they think they should do, rather than what they want to do. 

We all know from our own experience, that thinking about the future is different from thinking about the present. Tomorrow morning, I’ll go jogging. Next week, I’ll drink less. Well, but do you???

When considering the future “people think about high level goals: What is this action good for?, explains Rogers, who conducted the research at Harvard Business School. “But in the present, they think about concrete outcomes: what are the immediate consequences of this action for me?”

The researchers explored a range of scenarios with over 900 participants, from plans that would make automatic retirement account contributions (a should), while reducing take-home pay (an undesirable) to policies that would reduce overfishing (a should), while increasing the prize of fish (an undesirable).

Ask for future donations

Rogers points out that non-profits can easily apply this principle to fundraising. When appealing to donors one should emphazise that their contributions will be implemented in the future. This recommendation is confirmed by another research which found out that donors to a Danish non-profit upped their regular donations when asked to do so in the future, rather than in the present. 

People struggle to make the choices they know they should make and, at a profound level, wish that they did make, says Rogers. By designing appeals and policies that emphasize the future rather than the present, non-profits … can help the should beat out the wants.

The Art of Raising Money

Recently the New York Times brought an article about new research concerning the economics of philanthropy. John List and Dean Karlan, both economics professors at the University of Chicago and Yale respectively, conduct real-world experiments in order to find out what works in philanthropy and what doesn’t.

One of the experiments concerned matching gifts, the idea that a donor agrees to match any gift, dollar for dollar or dollar for 2 dollars etc. The idea seems to work and is common practice in many fundraisers, but nobody really knows if matching gifts really are effective.

In order to find out, Karlan and List drew up different solicitation letters for a fundraising group. The letters were similar except for the part that mentioned (or didn’t mention) a match. In one letter they announced a dollar for dollar match, in another the match was increased to two to one, in a third one it was three to one. A control group received letters in which no match was offered.

What did they find out? The existence of a matching gift did matter very much, Thus 2.2 % of people who recieved the match offer made a donation, compared with only 1.8% of the control group, resulting in a 20% gap between the two responses. But surprisingly, the size of the match didn’t have any effect on giving. “Donors who recieved the offer of a one-to-one match gave just as often, and just as much, as those responding to the three-to-one offer.”

In another experiment, List set out to see whether donors cared about so-called seed money. In a letter to potential donors, they varied the amount of money that supposedly had already been raised for a cause. The results were striking: The more upfront money the charity claimed to have on hand, the more additional money it raised. When paired with the matching-gift research, the study suggests that seed money is a better investments for charities than generous matches.

Interesting stuff, no?