[Question] Experience with Donation Matching Initiatives?

[sreers]

Hi all!

I’m hoping to begin an initiative to push for donation matching at my company and wanted to see if anyone here has any experience doing similar things and has any suggestions /​ things to keep in mind to make the initiative a success.

[Aaron Gertler]

Consider reaching out to High Impact Professionals, a new charity which is helping people organize workplace giving campaigns. I’m not sure whether they’d have advice on getting donation matching set up, but there’s a chance!

[david_reinstein]

I’ve also been encouraging HIP and others to try to keep a systematic record of what works in convincing employers and mainstream organisations to support effective charities in their CSR and employee matching activities. … Or at least to not limit their charity support to local (and usually less effective) organisations.

You can see some of my earlier thoughts and attempts to try to get this knowledge sharing going at innovationsinfundraising.org. I think it may be a good project for HIP to take the lead on?

[david_reinstein]

Some quick thoughts… Seem e.g. innovationsinfundraising.org

The evidence suggests that donation matching may not actually lead to people who donations are matched to necessarily donate more out of their own pocket.

However, it could be that by advocating donation matching you get more donations In total, as the idea of donation matching motivates the matcher to give more as well.

[sreers]

Thanks everyone for the comments & resources!

Interesting—do you have any sources for the evidence suggesting “that donation matching may not actually lead to people who donations are matched to necessarily donate more out of their own pocket”?

Edit: is this what you were referring to? source (in the “offer a matching donation” row)

There is some evidence that the presence of a match does increase out-of-pocket donations (Karlan and List); however, it works in an unpredictable way and may act simply as a signal. It may even be counterproductive (Huck and Rasul, ’11), better to be simply a ‘lead gift’. However, we have evidence from only a few selected field experiments, not from a broad range of settings. Meier (’07) finds the positive (participation?) effect may be crowded-out in the longer run when the match is removed.

[david_reinstein]

Essentially yes. I was giving my impression of the consensus of the academic literature, partly from memory. But I’m fairly confident in my memory of this, and you can see the citations in that resource.