It's Not the Thought that Counts: A Field Experiment on Gift Exchange and Giving at a Public University

Abstract

One of the most important outstanding questions in fundraising is whether donor premiums, or gifts to prospective donors, are effective in increasing donations. Donors may be motivated by reciprocity, making premium recipients more likely to donate and give larger donations. Or donors may dislike premiums, preferring instead to maximize the value of their donations to the charity; in this case donor premiums would be ineffective. We conduct a field experiment in conjunction with the fundraising campaign of a major university to examine these questions. Treatments include a control, an unconditional premium with two gift quality levels, and a set of conditional premium treatments. The conditional treatments include opt-out and opt-in conditions to test whether donors prefer to forego premiums. Compared with the control, donors are twice as likely to give when they receive an unconditional, high-quality gift. The low-quality unconditional and all conditional premiums have little impact on the likelihood or level of giving. Donors do not respond negatively to premiums: rates of giving do not suffer when premiums are offered. In addition, few opt out given the opportunity to do so, indicating that they like gifts, and suggesting that reciprocity rather than altruism determines the impact of premiums on giving.

Stories of strangers: Writing donor acquisition letters in the human services

“…Suggesting an amount to give can increase the response to a mailing, as well as affecting the size of the gifts received (De Bruyn & Prokopec, 2013;Edwards & List, 2014). There is mixed evidence on the practice of offering a donor premium: some studies find a negative effect on response rate (Chao, 2017;Newman & Shen, 2012), while others find that premiums can enhance and will not depress response (Eckel, Herberich, & Meer, 2016).…”

Does fundraising create new giving?

“…The key result is that giving is rare without fundraising. Charities often look to spur donations through various inducements, like providing gifts (Falk, 2007;Alpizar, Carlsson, and Johansson-Stenman, 2008;Eckel, Herberich, Meer, 2015), recognition and prestige (Harbaugh, 1998), and, very commonly, matching grants (Eckel and Grossman, 2008;Karlan and List, 2007;Huck, Rasul, and Shepherd, 2015). In general, the existence of a match increases the likelihood of receiving a donation, though not on the size of the donation, and the rate of the match appears to have little impact.…”

A Glimpse into the World of High Capacity Givers: Experimental Evidence from a University Capital Campaign

“…Related work byAndreoni, et al (2015),Eckel et al (2015),and Kessler, et al (2015) also explores high capacity donors.…”