Matched Fundraising: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By Steffen Huck, Imran Rasul. Social Science Research Network, 2010
192 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present evidence from a natural field experiment designed to shed light on the efficacy of fundraising schemes in which donations are matched by a lead donor. In conjunction with the Bavarian State Opera House, we mailed 14,000 regular opera attendees a letter describing a charitable fundraising project organized by the opera house. Recipients were randomly assigned to treatments designed to explore behavioral responses to linear matching schemes, as well as the mere existence of a substantial lead donor. We use the exogenous variation in match rates across treatments to estimate the price elasticities of charitable giving. We find that straight linear matching schemes raise the total donations received including the match value, but partially crowd out the actual donations given excluding the match. If charitable organizations can use lead gifts as they wish, our results show they maximize donations given by simply announcing the presence of a lead gift. We contrast our price elasticity estimates with those based on changes in rules regarding tax deductions for charitable giving, as well as from the nascent literature using large-scale natural field experiments on giving.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36c5206237cc8dea9df6b38904456b580a7d5fe6
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Citations in the corpus
- Fundraising through online social networks: A field experiment on peer-to-peer solicitation (2014, unknown): “This is in accordancewiththeresearchonmatchingfundsincharitabledonations (Karlan and List, 2007; Eckel and Grossman, 2008; Huck and Rasul, 2011) where larger monetary matches are not more effective than smaller matches.”
- Behavioural science and policy: where are we now and where are we going? (2018, background): “Examples might be changes to the way payments are structured, such as using lotteries (SBST, 2016), different match rates (Huck & Rasul, 2011) or social incentives (BIT, 2016).10 However, despite these apparent advantages, the proportion of behavioural science interventions that reach scale could…”