Do Appeals to Donor Benefits Raise More Money than Appeals to Recipient Benefits? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Pick.Click.Give

John List, James Murphy, Michael Price and Alexander James

No 2019-07, Working Papers from University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics

Abstract: We partnered with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give. Charitable Contributions Program to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to explore whether targeted appeals emphasizing donor benefits through warm glow impact donations. Results highlight the relative import of appeals to self. Individuals who received such an appeal were 4.5 percent more likely to give and gave 20 percent more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits had no effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm glow appeals in the subsequent year.

Keywords: field experiment; experimental economics; charitable giving; philanthropy; warm glow; nonprofits; altruism; Alaska; Permanent Fund Dividend (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D01 D64 D91 H41 L30 L38 M31 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ltv and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econpapers.uaa.alaska.edu/RePEC/ala/wpaper/ALA201907.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Appeals to Donor Benefits Raise More Money than Appeals to Recipient Benefits? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Pick.Click.Give (2019)
Working Paper: Do Appeals to Donor Benefits Raise More Money than Appeals to Recipient Benefits? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Pick.Click.Give (2019)
Working Paper: Do Appeals to Donor Benefits Raise More Money than Appeals to Recipient Benefits? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Pick.Click.Give (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ala:wpaper:2019-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Alevy ().