Prior research on donation matching has produced mixed findings. Offering to match donations sometimes increases the likelihood and/or the amount of giving (22–24), but matching can also crowd out donations, leading to lower amounts given (25, 26). As with bundling, our use of matching is crucially different from its use in prior research or in philanthropy more broadly. Here, we use matching not to increase the amount that donors give but to increase the effectiveness of giving by shifting donations toward highly effective charities.
So this is a particular kind of match (which, OK, is similar to the one here, probably highly relevant)
Their results are mostly based on ‘framed experiment’ data from MTurk (people who know they are in an experiment) with small stakes ($100 which only matters wiht a fairly small probability).
IIRC they found in most studies/conditions that people did not give more (out of pocket) in total when the match favoring the effective charity was added, but they gave more to the effective charity.
They also report evidence from GivingMultiplier itself, which raised substantial amounts of money, noting “73% of donors indicated that they had not previously heard of the effective charity to which they donated, indicating that most donors were not previously oriented toward effective giving.”
In this particular case there is an RCT: Caviola and Greene, 2023.
As they write:
So this is a particular kind of match (which, OK, is similar to the one here, probably highly relevant)
Their results are mostly based on ‘framed experiment’ data from MTurk (people who know they are in an experiment) with small stakes ($100 which only matters wiht a fairly small probability).
IIRC they found in most studies/conditions that people did not give more (out of pocket) in total when the match favoring the effective charity was added, but they gave more to the effective charity.
They also report evidence from GivingMultiplier itself, which raised substantial amounts of money, noting “73% of donors indicated that they had not previously heard of the effective charity to which they donated, indicating that most donors were not previously oriented toward effective giving.”
This does seem rather positive on it’s face.