Giving Compass' Take:

• Ben Paynter explains how Ideas42 and Bright Funds designed a program to nudge donors to increase their charitable giving. 

• What does this successful experiment tell us about increasing donations? How can organizations use this information? 

• Read the full report: Best of Intentions. 

A few simple tricks–like telling people how close they are to their giving goal–prompts an enormous increase in donations.

More Americans feel like people should be acting at least twice as charitably as they really do. While most of us feel like people should be giving around 6% of their annual income to charity, the typical person actually gives about half that—only 3% overall. The gap between ambition and action leaves behind a huge sum of potential donations: about $291 billion.

Nonprofit behavioral design firm Ideas42 hopes to fix that. After discovering the discrepancy through its own research in 2016, the organization began experimenting with ways to change it. The result, which was achieved with backing from the Gates Foundation, is a newly released report entitled Best of Intentions. It reads like a theoretical generosity-inspiring playbook, chronicling the findings from several experiments that have nudged people toward auditing their own behavior and then acting more altruistically.

In one case, the group worked with Bright Funds, a workplace donation platform, to create a goal-setting tool and progress tracker on its giving homepage. The widget appeared six weeks before the end of the holiday season. Users could select what percentage of their income they wanted to donate and then enter an annual salary range to see the dollar amount they’d need to give, which they could then lock-in or modify. The experience included a message about what donors typically think people should give because that’s the sort of bar-setting that in other tests has been shown to nudge people toward acting more ambitiously.

Whenever users visited their account page, they’d see the balance remaining to meet that goal. (At one point, the team also sent an email reminder with dollars-given and distance-to-go figures.) In a controlled test of over 18,000 total account members, the setup led to a 7% increase among donors who were already giving regularly, and nearly 18% increase among those who hadn’t started. “We really see people changing behavior when they take a broader picture of their giving,” Parbhoo says.

Read the full article about nudging donors by Ben Paynter at FastCompany.