Giving Compass' Take:
- Research involving over two million online donors shows that small adjustments to donation prompts can make a significant impact, offering nonprofits actionable strategies to boost fundraising.
- How can strategic shifts in donation requests maximize donor engagement and contributions while continuing to prioritize long-term community support for nonprofits?
- Learn more about best practices in philanthropy.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits in your area.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
When you're checking out at an online store, it's increasingly common to get a prompt inviting you to toss in a few bucks to a good cause. Your decision to give (or not) may feel like a reflection of how generous you're feeling in the moment. Yet how you respond to these "microgiving" requests—including how much you donate—is also influenced by the information and options you see on the screen, and small adjustments to donation prompts can make a significant impact.
In a series of experiments involving more than 2 million PayPal users, researchers at the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford Graduate School of Business found that small adjustments to donation requests had sizable effects on how likely people were to donate and how much they gave.
These findings, published in a new report, have the potential to help nonprofits attract millions of new donors and significantly add to their coffers.
"Charitable giving is a really important source of fundraising for organizations, but in the real world, people are impulsive, they procrastinate, they don't fulfill their goals, they're not perfectly informed, and those are all things that get in the way," says Susan Athey, Ph.D. '95, a professor of economics at Stanford GSB and faculty director of the lab. "Our work shows that there are low-cost ways to potentially reduce friction and raise more money for good causes."
More Bang for the Buck with Small Adjustments to Donation Prompts
The first study was conducted using a feature that lets shoppers donate $1 to charity when they check out using PayPal. As they completed a transaction, a sample of 1.4 million users was randomly selected to see one of six short descriptions of a relatively unknown nonprofit fighting global poverty or no description at all.
Some of the one-line statements quantified outcomes (e.g., "$1 provides 2 people with free and reliable access to safe water for a year"), while others stuck to the narrative (e.g., "[This organization] provides free access to safe water"). The rest referenced the charity's rating from a third-party group.
Read the full article about the impact of small adjustments to donation prompts at Phys.org.