Donors who haven’t given in a while or who don’t feel strongly connected to a cause are more likely to contribute when they receive a small thank-you gift from the charity, new academic research finds.
“Charities might be underutilizing incentives,” says Kaitlin Woolley, an associate professor at Cornell University and co-author of the article detailing the research, published in the journal Psychological Science.
When people who aren’t already deeply motivated by a cause know they’ll get something in return, they are more likely to donate, the research found. The research included both hypothetical and real-world experiments to find out how much an incentive affected people’s willingness to donate. The gifts were all priced under $3. “We didn’t find that the size of the incentive seemed to matter,” Woolley says.
Feeling About the Cause Matters
It was important to the researchers to distinguish whether incentives improved donations to all causes or just causes that donors already felt strongly compelled to help — something researchers described as “high prosocial motivation.”
“In general, some charities might be seen as having a stronger reason to give,” Woolley says of organizations for which donors feel high prosocial motivation. “People think it’s important; they think that they should be giving.”
In the hypothetical experiments, donors were asked if they would be willing to give to a charity, but they were not actually asked to donate their money.
In one of the experiments, research participants went to a simulated charity website, where some saw a pop-up ad saying they would get a small gift (a mug or tote bag) for donating $5. The researchers compared participants’ reactions to a charity for which most people feel high prosocial motivation (a U.N. refugee agency) to one with low prosocial motivation (a theater soliciting donations to keep films playing in the community). Providing an incentive increased donors’ willingness to give to the theater but had little impact on their willingness to give to the U.N. refugee agency.
“In that context, where people see the charity as relatively less important, the incentive was more motivating,” Woolley says. However, she adds that what people consider important and highly prosocial will vary. “There’s still intensity differences within people about whether they’re going to give or not, and we find that incentives can help, even if it’s a relatively important charity.”
Postcard Promising Seeds
The real-world experiment involved an unnamed university that mailed a postcard to 22,468 alumni. Everyone who received the postcard was a previous donor. The postcard said on the front, “One seed leads to another; your generosity plants the seed that allows our students to grow,” and on the back, “Thank you for growing with [the university].” Almost half received just the postcard, while the rest received the card plus a packet of seeds.
Alumni who had donated consecutively in the previous two years were coded as having high prosocial motivation. Lapsed donors who had not given during that time frame were coded as having low prosocial motivation. Lapsed donors were 88 percent more likely to donate when they received the seed packet than when they received just the postcard. However, the seeds had “no significant effect” on the donors who had given in the previous two years.
Woolley says alumni-affairs officials at the university worried that including a gift might somehow discourage their frequent donors from giving again. “They were concerned that it could be demotivating,” she says. “The fact that we didn’t see a drop-off for those highly prosocial donors was really important for the findings.”
Woolley says having a gift and message that complement each other likely helped, although this factor was not tested in the experiment. “My intuition is that having a right fit between the messaging and the gift is probably a component that’s at play,” she says.
The research was not longitudinal, so there is no data on whether those lapsed alumni donors who gave again after receiving the seeds continued to give in later campaigns.
