People are often influenced by information about other people’s behavior, that is, social information. Social information is frequently used by practitioners hoping to increase charitable giving, while the precise mechanisms through which social information works are unknown. We conducted a systematic literature review of 35 studies reporting on the effects of social information on charitable giving. We show that several studies report no or even negative effects and that a theoretical understanding of social information effects is lacking. We integrate the empirical findings in the wider fields of social psychology and behavioral economics and propose an integrative theoretical model. The model includes four mediators and three moderators that can explain positive and negative effects of social information. This theoretical framework can assist researchers to obtain a deeper understanding of social information and support practitioners in implementing giving tools in donation campaigns.

Purposely guiding human decision making with a discrete suggestion, ‘nudging’, is increasingly popular. One particularly promising nudge is to provide decision makers with information about the decisions of others, also referred to as social information. Social information is often applied in fundraising campaigns to increase individual donations. A discrete suggestion such as the donation amount of others can result in donors donating similar amounts. We examined effects of social information in a relatively new context, namely crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a new online fundraising tool. Our study, based on a large natural field experiment (n = 24,070), tests to what extent social information affects online donation behavior and how its effects vary throughout the duration of a campaign. We show that social information increases the individual donation amount by 17%, which is close to the average of 14% found in previous studies. However, social information did not attract more donors: the participation rate was not affected. Our study is the first to pinpoint the stage of the funding campaign at which the effect of social information is most pronounced. We found that social information is most effective in increasing donations at the beginning of crowdfunding campaigns. All materials for this article are available at https://osf.io/epuj6/.

New online forms of giving have appeared next to more traditional ways like doorto-door collections. One of these new forms is philanthropic crowdfunding: donation-and reward-based crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a promising method for mobilising and recruiting donors who may be unreachable via traditional methods.We analysed online giving via crowdfunding, focusing on donor characteristics and giving behaviour before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis comprises survey research (n = 2125) observing giving behaviour on an individual level for both donors and non-donors. Our contributions are twofold. First, we report on the characteristics of donors who give to crowdfunding sources and in relation to donors who give via a door-to-door (i.e., 'traditional') collection focusing on microrather than macro-level data. Second, we compare the giving behaviour via crowdfunding with references to door-to-door collections before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the percentage of individuals supporting crowdfunding

Social information, providing potential donors with information about the donation amount given by earlier donors, is often applied as an intervention in online donation contexts. It has been suggested that social information informs others about the most common (descriptive norm) or appropriate (injunctive norm) behavior, and that these perceived social norms explain its effects. We present evidence from a preregistered online experiment testing to what extent perceived social norms mediate effects of social information on charitable giving. In addition, we examine whether social information affects donors’ moods. A positive mood after donating is important to avoid negative side effects of a nudge like social information. We argue that social information increases social pressure to donate in a certain way and therefore decreases donors’ moods. In an experiment among British citizens (n = 1029), we manipulated descriptive and injunctive social information. We show that injunctive social information, mentioning the appropriate donation amount, increases donation amounts (10%) and donors’ moods (10%). Contrary to earlier research, merely stating descriptive social information did not affect the donation behavior or mood. We found no evidence that social information affects giving behavior or mood via perceived social norms. Our findings how different types of social information affect charitable giving are important for fundraisers or policy makers aiming to increase charitable behavior.

Which novelties do donation-and reward-based crowdfunding bring to philanthropy? Scholars interested in crowdfunding contributed to developing empirical explanations on which features impact online giving. However, the focus on theory building is limited. We developed a theoretical framework by categorizing the empirical findings reported in 198 studies, which resulted in four crowdfunding features impacting giving: (1) project creator, (2) social information,(3) rewards, and (4) project description. We explain why these features impact giving by integrating them with insights from several fields of social sciences, deriving ten giving mechanisms. We conclude that with impacting donations via crowdfunding, three giving themes exist: being affected by (1) the perceived project's quality, (2) social connections and/or (3) tangible rewards. The categorization of mechanisms for giving allows initiators to extract best practice examples for increasing the probability of successful crowdfunding projects considering the giving mechanisms.