Donors Give More to Joint Appeals, Study Finds

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The Theory

Nonprofits are often urged to collaborate in the interest of efficiency. So researchers at Texas A&M, the University of Maryland, and Ozyegin University in Turkey wanted to test whether charities with different causes could successfully raise money together.

The Test

The researchers gave subjects a pool of money for making donations to eight nonprofits at their discretion. In an in-person lab experiment, one group of subjects received a sequence of requests for gifts, one from each nonprofit. A second group received a single message containing donation requests for all eight charities. The researchers also tested a variety of scenarios with subgroups.

The Results

Donors generally gave more when presented with one list of multiple requests than a sequence of requests.

However, subjects who received eight separate appeals but were informed ahead of time that there would be eight gave at rates similar to those who received a single list of donation requests. Meanwhile, subjects who received separate requests but who were not told that more were coming gave generously to early requests but decreased their giving to later ones, apparently because they were concerned about running out of money for requests still to come.

Dig Deeper

The paper’s authors pointed out their experiments tested requests from nonprofits with diverse causes, such as women’s health and the environment. Campaigns among similar nonprofits, whose popularity and name recognition might induce different donor behaviors, could produce different results, they said.

Find It

“Independent vs. Collaborative Fundraising: Understanding the Role of Information” is a working paper at the University of Maryland by Catherine Eckel, Begum Guney, and Neslihan Uler.