Toward an understanding of why suggestions work in charitable fundraising: Theory and evidence from a natural field experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Edwards, James T.; List, John A.
• 署名单位: University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.02.002
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 1-13
• 关键词: Charitable giving; public economics; impure altruism

摘要

People respond to those who ask. Within the charitable fundraising community, the power of the ask represents the backbone of most fundraising strategies. Despite this, the optimal design of communication strategies has received less formal attention. For their part, economists have recently explored how communication affects empathy, altruism, and giving rates to charities. Our study takes a step back from this literature to examine how suggestions-a direct ask for a certain amount of money-affect giving rates. We find that our suggestion amounts affect both the intensive and extensive margins: more people give and they tend to give the suggested amount The resulting insights help us understand why people give, why messages work, and deepen practitioners' understanding of how to use messages to leverage more giving. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.