How to Design the Ask? Funding Units vs. Giving Money

Johannes Diederich (), Raphael Epperson () and Timo Goeschl

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: Unit donations are an alternative fundraising scheme in which potential donors choose how many units of a charitable good to fund, rather than just giving money. Based on evidence from an online experiment with 8,673 participants, we demonstrate that well-designed unit donation schemes can significantly boost giving above and beyond the standard money donation scheme. A decomposition of the underlying mechanisms shows patterns consistent with the conjecture that unit donations increase impact salience and leverage donors’ cognitive biases by changing the metric of the donation space. Managers need to weigh the potential fundraising benefits of a unit scheme against some important challenges, such as expert handling of the choice of unit sizes.

Keywords: Aid effectiveness; charitable giving; framing; restricted choice; unit donation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 H4 L31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 68
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2022-18.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How to Design the Ask? Funding Units vs. Giving Money (2023)
Working Paper: How to Design the Ask? Funding Units vs. Giving Money (2022)
Working Paper: How to Design the Ask? Funding Units vs. Giving Money (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2022-18

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