Charity rating agencies often focus on overhead cost ratios in evaluating charities, and donors appear to be sensitive …-used metric and a charity’s effectiveness. There is evidence that a focus on overhead costs leads charities to underinvest in … whether donors care about overhead costs, whether they are good measures of charity effectiveness, and what effects a focus on …

One of the most important outstanding questions in fundraising is whether donor premiums, or gifts to prospective … donations to the charity; in this case donor premiums would be ineffective. We conduct a field experiment in conjunction with … the fundraising campaign of a major university to examine these questions. Treatments include a control, an unconditional …