We conducted a field experiment with a charitable group to investigate whether giving the donor an option to write a personal message to the recipient influences giving behavior. Over 1,500 households were approached in a door-to-door campaign and randomized to either a control or a treatment in...

Calling to thank donors is a key fundraising strategy in the non-profit sector. Yet the effectiveness of these calls remains untested. We report on field experiments with public television stations and a national non-profit in which new donors were randomized to receive a thank-you call or not....

Direct mail fundraisers commonly provide a set of suggested donation amounts to potential donors, in addition to the option of writing in an amount. Yet little systematic evidence exists about the causal effects of suggested donation amounts on giving behavior. To this end, we conducted a field...

Recognizing donors by revealing their identities is important for increasing charitable giving. Using a framed field experiment, we show that all forms of recognition that we examine increase donations relative to the baseline treatment, and recognizing only the highest or only the lowest donors...

There is a widespread belief among fundraisers that solicitations by volunteers will be more effective than solicitations by paid workers. To explore whether this belief has merit, we conduct a door-to-door fundraising experiment in which solicitors communicate their compensation status to...

What happens when charities compete? We begin to answer this question through a laboratory experiment in which subjects play two public goods games simultaneously. We systematically vary the incentives for contributing in one of the games – investigating the effects of recognition, a bonus...