How responsive are charitable donors to requests to give?

Abstract

People tend to contribute to a charity only when they are asked to. Although this so-called 'power of asking' is a well-known technique among fundraisers, the existing literature does not pay much attention to the role of donation requests in charitable giving. We estimate the causal effects of charitable solicitations on both the propensity to give and the amount of charitable contributions using a unique data set, which was designed to measure the giving behavior in the United States. In order to address the endogeneity of the donation requests due to non-random solicitation of charitable donors, we link this data set to IRS data on charitable organizations and the 2000 Census and propose identifying instruments. After controlling for the endogeneity, we find that people are both more likely to contribute to a charity and also donate more when they are asked to. This effect is robust under different specifications and with different sets of instruments and is much larger compared with the estimates of univariate models. Furthermore, we argue that some identifiable characteristics of individuals are associated with the higher probability of being solicited. In particular, we find some evidence that income, age, education, and race play significant roles in explaining the selection of potential charitable donors.

Do fundraisers select charitable donors based on gender and race? Evidence from survey data

“…Obviously, since blacks volunteer more than whites when they are asked to, fundraisers should always solicit from blacks until all blacks are solicited. 19 Here, I focus on a more interesting scenario. How much additional charity can be created if blacks and whites were equally likely to be solicited?…”

“…Although, it is almost a truism among professional fundraisers that asking facilitates charitable behavior, 2 economists have only recently begun to investigate the e¤ect of personal solicitations on charitable donations of time and money. Using survey data, Freeman (1997) and Yörük (2008) …nd that being personally asked to volunteer is the single most important reason for why people volunteer their time, while Schervish and Havens (1997), Yörük (2009) Given the considerable e¤ect of personal solicitations on giving and volunteering, an important question is how fundraisers select potential donors to solicit? In this paper, I investigate this previously unexplored question in the literature.…”

“…Using cross-sectional survey data, they …nd that older, well-educated people with higher household incomes are more likely to be solicited by charities. On the other hand, Yörük (2009) argues that fundraisers use donor databases to select potential donors.…”

Do Charitable Solicitations Matter? A Comparative Analysis of Fundraising Methods*

“…In conducting the KM, I use an Epanechnikov kernel with a bandwidth of 0:01. 17 All of these methods are estimated non-parametrically and share the advantage that they avoid functional form assumptions to estimate equation (4). However, they are reliable to the extent that unobservables correlated with responding to certain fundraising method do not directly a¤ect the contribution amount.…”

“…data, Yörük (2009) of these studies focus on the e¤ectiveness of a particular fundraising method without making any comparison with other fundraising techniques. 4 Hence, one cannot determine whether the behavior of donors or the amount of their contributions would change had they been received a charitable solicitation via some alternative fundraising method.…”