No strong evidence that a third party offering a match for charity A boosts the amount other people give to charity A.
There are several academic papers investigating that in the lab and in natural field settings and they find mixed results, often finding it leads people to give less of their own money to charity A.
Of course it’s very hard to measure whether ‘a match for charity A causes people to give less to all charities in net over a long period’. Hard to get data on personal total giving in the presence of randomized interventions.
(There’s also a literature on the ‘price elasticity of giving’ in the presence of tax incentives … again, mixed as to whether it exceeds the ‘gold standard’ such that subsidies increase the amount people sacrifice of their own wealth.)
PS I had this all organized on a site called innovationsinfundraising.org but I took it down bc I couldn’t keep it current, and it was costly to maintain the web site. Hope to put it iup again and to give a more detailed response here.
UPDATE—I think the present context is more about ‘offering a match to people who give to a less effective charity to convince them to reallocate towards a more effective one’. I think the evidence is more positive and promising about THIS, as Jeff notes. (Although it would be nice to see further independent replications.)
No strong evidence that a third party offering a match for charity A boosts the amount other people give to charity A.
There are several academic papers investigating that in the lab and in natural field settings and they find mixed results, often finding it leads people to give less of their own money to charity A.
Of course it’s very hard to measure whether ‘a match for charity A causes people to give less to all charities in net over a long period’. Hard to get data on personal total giving in the presence of randomized interventions.
(There’s also a literature on the ‘price elasticity of giving’ in the presence of tax incentives … again, mixed as to whether it exceeds the ‘gold standard’ such that subsidies increase the amount people sacrifice of their own wealth.)
PS I had this all organized on a site called innovationsinfundraising.org but I took it down bc I couldn’t keep it current, and it was costly to maintain the web site. Hope to put it iup again and to give a more detailed response here.
UPDATE—I think the present context is more about ‘offering a match to people who give to a less effective charity to convince them to reallocate towards a more effective one’. I think the evidence is more positive and promising about THIS, as Jeff notes. (Although it would be nice to see further independent replications.)