Enhancing Donor Agency to Improve Charitable Giving: Strategies and Heterogeneity
研究通过大型实地实验发现，允许捐赠者选择具体项目或捐赠金额可提升42%的筹款收入，且不同捐赠者反应差异显著，为慈善机构优化筹款策略提供依据。
This research investigates whether charities can enhance fundraising effectiveness by increasing donors’ sense of agency. This article introduces two strategies that allow donors to target individual charitable projects, either via the choice options (targeting-via-options) or via the suggested donation amounts (targeting-via-amounts). A large-scale field experiment involving more than 40,000 prospective donors manipulates the ability to control the allocation of the charity's resources and finds that enhancing donor agency boosts fundraising revenue by 42%. A causal forest analysis indicates significant donor heterogeneity, with a subset of donors being three times more responsive to the opportunity to target their gift than the average donor. Inactive donors, “clumpy” donors (who exhibit uneven donation patterns), and donors who concentrate their gifts during the popular giving periods are less responsive to interventions, whereas frequent, generous, and long-tenured donors are more responsive to them. Three experiments offer stronger internal validity regarding the manipulations and process evidence that agency—and not emotion—is responsible for the increased donation effects. An optimization analysis provides implications for how charities can leverage these insights to manage their fundraising campaigns to greater success.