Increasing charitable giving

How can we nudge people to donate to charities? There are many ways to do so, but we would like to share one in particular which is very simple and surprisingly powerful.

It seems that peer effects are an effective tool to change people’s behaviour. We want to do what people like us are doing. If teenagers have friends that smoke, they are very likely to start smoking themselves (and much more likely than if their parents smoke). The same holds for donations – if our colleagues donate, we would like to donate as well.

This is what has been tested by the UK´s Behavioural Insights Team in cooperation with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). The HMRC employees in Essex were sent postcards describing the donation efforts of their colleagues and encouraging them to do the same, to see if more people would start donating. However the experiment went even further (and this is where it gets interesting). One group of employees got postcards featuring a picture of the donor in addition to the above information (see Picture 1). An insignificant change, you may think, but 6.4 % of people signed up for the donation scheme in the latter condition, compared to 2.9 % in the no-picture condition.

Picture 1: Postcard featuring a photo of the donor

Source: The Behavioural Insights Team (2013)

If you want to know more about behavioural insights applied to charitable giving, see The Behavioural Insights Team (2010) and for a further discussion of peer effects (social norms), read Institute for Government & Cabinet Office (2010).