Research article published in Science Advances, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) open access multidisciplinary journal.
Incentivizing donors to split their donations between a favorite charity and a highly effective charity boosts their impact.
Volume 9 | Issue 3
January 2023
Authors: Lucius Caviola and Joshua D. Greene
"First, participants identified their favorite charity by entering its name and website URL. In all conditions apart from the favorite-only condition, participants were presented with a short and accurate description of one of the world’s most effective charities: Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative (see the Supplementary Materials). Participants were also informed that this charity is, according to experts, approximately 100 times more effective than typical charities."
Abstract
The most effective charities are hundreds of times more impactful than typical charities. However, most donors favor charities with personal/emotional appeal over effectiveness. We gave donors the option to split their donations between their personal favorite charity and an expert-recommended highly effective charity. This bundling technique increased donors’ impact without undermining their altruistic motivation, boosting effective donations by 76%. An additional boost of 55% was achieved by offering matching donations with increasing rates for allocating more to the highly effective charity. We show further that matching funds can be provided by donors focused on effectiveness through a self-sustaining process of micromatching. We applied these techniques in a new online donation platform (GivingMultiplier.org), which fundraised more than $1.5 million in its first 14 months. While prior applied research on altruism has focused on the quantity of giving, the present results demonstrate the value of focusing on the effectiveness of altruistic behavior.
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