I donât know if this is addressed in the literature, but what is your best guess for the large discrepancy between how many people say they are influenced by the match and the numbers you were finding?
A secondary thought is that I think I would expect the effect of the match to be stronger on social media due to the eye-catching effect. Though I would certainly have expected stronger effects (maybe 75%) from the studies. Almost all of the money raised on my match so far has been via the âpassiveâ social media exposure, rather than actively contacting people.
On a personal level, I donât like fundraising on a gut level in the first place (I put it ânecessary evilâ territory). The match makes me feel less bad about it, which is probably worth something if possibly not much.
what is your best guess for the large discrepancy between how many people say they are influenced by the match and the numbers you were finding?
Couple hypotheses:
Personally, if information is available to me, my default assumption is that it influenced my behavior.
Also, if you view yourself as a rational agent, then the donation match should clearly affect your behavior, so the ego-preserving answer is âyes.â
Also, a ~20% increase in revenue is consistent with 50% of people responding to the match, if half of those (25% of all donors) donated a small amount but would not have donated at all otherwise, and the other half went from the average to 1.5x the average.
A secondary thought is that I think I would expect the effect of the match to be stronger on social media due to the eye-catching effect.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldnât find any field experiments on social media campaigns. It seems pretty hard to study. Actually, Charity Science might be in an ideal place to look at this with their birthday/âChristmas fundraisers...
I couldnât find any field experiments on social media campaigns. It seems pretty hard to study. Actually, Charity Science might be in an ideal place to look at this with their birthday/âChristmas fundraisers...
We havenât directly tested matching scientifically yet, though weâd definitely like to. Our closest is in the write-up you mention âThe Power of Donation Matchingâ where we anecdotally observed a time-ordered effect of introducing âliveâ donation matching (though this could be due to other factors, and isnât evidence of matching overall).
Yeah. If it turns out that the true effect is smaller than you observed in that post (which it may well not beâlots of heterogeneity), my guess would be that the spike was partly caused by some interaction with people promoting it at the same time. But again, itâs super hard to tell without randomization, because the effects vary so much.
Yeah, although youâd have to be careful to account for whether people who get matching promote their campaign more, and youâd probably need a fairly large sample of fundraisers because thereâs a lot of variance in amount raised. It seems like a fairly tricky study to do.
(Out of curiosity, do you have a list of fundraiser totals anywhere? That would help calculate the study power.)
Thanks for working on this.
I donât know if this is addressed in the literature, but what is your best guess for the large discrepancy between how many people say they are influenced by the match and the numbers you were finding?
A secondary thought is that I think I would expect the effect of the match to be stronger on social media due to the eye-catching effect. Though I would certainly have expected stronger effects (maybe 75%) from the studies. Almost all of the money raised on my match so far has been via the âpassiveâ social media exposure, rather than actively contacting people.
On a personal level, I donât like fundraising on a gut level in the first place (I put it ânecessary evilâ territory). The match makes me feel less bad about it, which is probably worth something if possibly not much.
Couple hypotheses:
Personally, if information is available to me, my default assumption is that it influenced my behavior.
Also, if you view yourself as a rational agent, then the donation match should clearly affect your behavior, so the ego-preserving answer is âyes.â
Also, a ~20% increase in revenue is consistent with 50% of people responding to the match, if half of those (25% of all donors) donated a small amount but would not have donated at all otherwise, and the other half went from the average to 1.5x the average.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldnât find any field experiments on social media campaigns. It seems pretty hard to study. Actually, Charity Science might be in an ideal place to look at this with their birthday/âChristmas fundraisers...
We havenât directly tested matching scientifically yet, though weâd definitely like to. Our closest is in the write-up you mention âThe Power of Donation Matchingâ where we anecdotally observed a time-ordered effect of introducing âliveâ donation matching (though this could be due to other factors, and isnât evidence of matching overall).
Yeah. If it turns out that the true effect is smaller than you observed in that post (which it may well not beâlots of heterogeneity), my guess would be that the spike was partly caused by some interaction with people promoting it at the same time. But again, itâs super hard to tell without randomization, because the effects vary so much.
I quite like the idea of randomizing who gets matching funding on birthdays and seeing if we can pick up any differences between the two groups.
Yeah, although youâd have to be careful to account for whether people who get matching promote their campaign more, and youâd probably need a fairly large sample of fundraisers because thereâs a lot of variance in amount raised. It seems like a fairly tricky study to do.
(Out of curiosity, do you have a list of fundraiser totals anywhere? That would help calculate the study power.)