Agree with Owen’s PR concerns, and with Ben about being especially virtuous. GiveWell have written about this as well, they call it a donor illusion.
That said, I think matching challenges are almost always fake, and maybe they’re a useful tool we should be using. But we can at least try to make it less fake and less obvious.
No studies found strong, generalizable negative effects of donation matching. However, several found worrying hints: Meier 2006 found that may have decreased net long-run donations, Eckel and Grossman 2008 found that it decreased response rate among some donors (probably due to the study’s unfamiliar-looking fundraising appeal), and there’s weak evidence that higher matching levels can actually crowd out some donations.
Agree with Owen’s PR concerns, and with Ben about being especially virtuous. GiveWell have written about this as well, they call it a donor illusion.
That said, I think matching challenges are almost always fake, and maybe they’re a useful tool we should be using. But we can at least try to make it less fake and less obvious.
Ben Kuhn has summarised the evidence on matching challenges: