As far as I know, there is still no strong solid public evidence that even actual counterfactual donation matching increases giving in net.
It may increase donations insofar as it encourages the person offering the match to give more, but the evidence is far from clear that it causes the regular donors to give more pre-match.
See the economics literature on the price elasticity of giving and matching mechanisms. (Happy to be corrected if new work is out I’m not aware of)
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.”
Do you mean no strong evidence of increase in aggregate giving levels across all charities, no strong evidence that offering a match increases sums donated to that charity (even at the cost of others), both, or something else?
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.)
As far as I know, there is still no strong solid public evidence that even actual counterfactual donation matching increases giving in net.
It may increase donations insofar as it encourages the person offering the match to give more, but the evidence is far from clear that it causes the regular donors to give more pre-match.
See the economics literature on the price elasticity of giving and matching mechanisms. (Happy to be corrected if new work is out I’m not aware of)
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.
Do you mean no strong evidence of increase in aggregate giving levels across all charities, no strong evidence that offering a match increases sums donated to that charity (even at the cost of others), both, or something else?
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.)