Amazing work! Donation bundling is a really great application of temptation bundling and I can see how it could really accelerate the adoption of effective giving. I am also really excited to see you translating your research into practice. Some quick thoughts:
It would be interesting to have an post test survey to track who gives and why, for example to see the extent to which different demographic factors (e.g., age and gender) and psychographic factors (e.g., attitude toward effective giving/belief in existential risk/self rated knowledge of effectiveness) correlate with different donation choices. Also: How do people feel that exposure to this service has changed them/their views (e.g., do they think they are more likely to give effectively and recommend it?
It would be interested to track changes over time and compare if those exposed to donation bundling differ much from a cohort who haven’t been in terms of their future attitudes and behaviour. Then we could see if engaging in EG via donation bundling leads to changes in attitudes and behaviour that sustain (potentially even when the EG donation bundling option is removed)
It will be important to maximise your traffic so have you thought about doing some sort of series of media releases (ideally with partner organisation) to make sure people know about the service?
I would also think about partnerships options for co-promotion: Intermediary services like workplace giving services, large and well networked (maybe semi-EA aligned) charities, Effective charities and EA recommendation services like TLYCS and Givewell.
Have you considered running experiments on the website using simple A/B tests? This seems like a great opportunity if you are getting the traffic.
You could test the effect of different numbers of options . I know, for example, that several EA organisation, like EAA, have wondered what the optimum number of options to show and there choice overload is often an issue in retail settings.
Testing other types of appeals/strategies could be interesting. For instance, normative appeals (e,g, X% choose this option), defaults (changing the initial value), chained/escalating approaches, like seeking a small commitment post donation (e.g., to read something about charitable donation or reflect on their donation approach) then seeing if that commitment/action shifts their identify/values and leads to greater donations relative to those who didn’t make the commitment).
Testing presentation difference—images v logos, stats v images v arguments, different types of narrative (e.g., opportunity v obligation arguments)
You state that “in some preliminary studies I found no significant differences in amounts given to effective charities depending on whether they focused on global poverty, animal welfare or existential risk”—this could be a chance to test this by pooling different charity types and assessing differences. Personally, I would be surprised if there aren’t some significant differences between demographic or psychographic groups, even if there are no differences on aggregate.
(and then I wrote a short essay—sorry—no need to respond to any/all of that but I hope some of it is useful!)
Thanks for these really helpful suggestions, Peter!
We are planning to test some of things you suggest. We kept our post-donation survey short because we wanted to focus on our main research question and not try to do too many things at once. But if we end up having a lot of donors, we might send them a survey via email to find out more about their demographics, beliefs and preferences. We’re not planning to do A/B testing at this point. But if we’re starting to get lots of donors, we’d definitely consider doing A/B testing to optimize the user experience and get more people to donate.
At this point, our primary goal is to test if the technique works in the real world and if we can get enough donors. Yes, we want to do media releases to get more traffic. And we are trying to partner with organizations and services to spread the word. I like your idea of reaching out to workplace giving services. If you have concrete ones in mind or have ideas how I could find these, please shoot me a DM!
Amazing work! Donation bundling is a really great application of temptation bundling and I can see how it could really accelerate the adoption of effective giving. I am also really excited to see you translating your research into practice. Some quick thoughts:
It would be interesting to have an post test survey to track who gives and why, for example to see the extent to which different demographic factors (e.g., age and gender) and psychographic factors (e.g., attitude toward effective giving/belief in existential risk/self rated knowledge of effectiveness) correlate with different donation choices. Also: How do people feel that exposure to this service has changed them/their views (e.g., do they think they are more likely to give effectively and recommend it?
It would be interested to track changes over time and compare if those exposed to donation bundling differ much from a cohort who haven’t been in terms of their future attitudes and behaviour. Then we could see if engaging in EG via donation bundling leads to changes in attitudes and behaviour that sustain (potentially even when the EG donation bundling option is removed)
It will be important to maximise your traffic so have you thought about doing some sort of series of media releases (ideally with partner organisation) to make sure people know about the service?
I would also think about partnerships options for co-promotion: Intermediary services like workplace giving services, large and well networked (maybe semi-EA aligned) charities, Effective charities and EA recommendation services like TLYCS and Givewell.
Have you considered running experiments on the website using simple A/B tests? This seems like a great opportunity if you are getting the traffic.
You could test the effect of different numbers of options . I know, for example, that several EA organisation, like EAA, have wondered what the optimum number of options to show and there choice overload is often an issue in retail settings.
Testing other types of appeals/strategies could be interesting. For instance, normative appeals (e,g, X% choose this option), defaults (changing the initial value), chained/escalating approaches, like seeking a small commitment post donation (e.g., to read something about charitable donation or reflect on their donation approach) then seeing if that commitment/action shifts their identify/values and leads to greater donations relative to those who didn’t make the commitment).
Testing presentation difference—images v logos, stats v images v arguments, different types of narrative (e.g., opportunity v obligation arguments)
You state that “in some preliminary studies I found no significant differences in amounts given to effective charities depending on whether they focused on global poverty, animal welfare or existential risk”—this could be a chance to test this by pooling different charity types and assessing differences. Personally, I would be surprised if there aren’t some significant differences between demographic or psychographic groups, even if there are no differences on aggregate.
(and then I wrote a short essay—sorry—no need to respond to any/all of that but I hope some of it is useful!)
Thanks for these really helpful suggestions, Peter!
We are planning to test some of things you suggest. We kept our post-donation survey short because we wanted to focus on our main research question and not try to do too many things at once. But if we end up having a lot of donors, we might send them a survey via email to find out more about their demographics, beliefs and preferences. We’re not planning to do A/B testing at this point. But if we’re starting to get lots of donors, we’d definitely consider doing A/B testing to optimize the user experience and get more people to donate.
At this point, our primary goal is to test if the technique works in the real world and if we can get enough donors. Yes, we want to do media releases to get more traffic. And we are trying to partner with organizations and services to spread the word. I like your idea of reaching out to workplace giving services. If you have concrete ones in mind or have ideas how I could find these, please shoot me a DM!