Traditional charities have historically used celebrity events, galas, public service announcements, and advertisements to solicit contributions. More recently, online crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and DonorsChoose have taken another route: By providing a direct connection with potential donors, they have eliminated the need for expensive marketing investments.

In a , we find that project stewards who contribute to their own campaigns within online crowdfunding platforms are significantly more likely to achieve funding success. This practice of self-donation serves as a powerful signaling tool. It highlights the project’s quality and importance, boosts the pace of donations, increases the total amount contributed, and enhances the overall likelihood of reaching funding goals. As nonprofits and educational causes increasingly rely on crowdfunding platforms, our research reveals how self-donation can effectively support these efforts.

Our team analyzed millions of donations on DonorsChoose, a well-known platform where teachers seek funds for classroom supplies, educational projects, and other instructional needs. We discovered that when teachers make visible self-donations to their projects, it strongly signals the project’s value and the teacher’s commitment. Our findings underscore that the effectiveness of self-donation is not solely about the amount contributed but also about the timing and visibility of these donations.

By investing their own money into their projects, teachers are more likely to attract additional support. This is particularly important for early-stage projects or for teachers who are new to the platform and have yet to build a reputation. A well-timed and visible self-donation at the start of a campaign can significantly increase the likelihood of reaching the funding goal. We also find that larger self-donations prove more effective in achieving fundraising goals. Further, projects involving a self-donation are more likely to send impact letters to donors to provide additional, yet indirect, evidence of the correlation between quality and self-donation.

Platforms should encourage project stewards to make visible self-donations as a means of improving the matching efficiency between donors and high-quality projects. This could involve highlighting self-donations on project landing pages or recommending projects based on the donor’s behavior. Such strategies could boost overall campaign success rates, benefiting both teachers and the students they serve.

A Viable Fundraising Strategy

The implications of our study extend to the broader educational community. School administrators and district leaders should encourage teachers to use self-donation as a fundraising strategy. In an era of tight school budgets, empowering teachers with effective fundraising tools can significantly enhance the quality of education that students receive. From the perspective of crowdfunding platforms like DonorsChoose, supporting and facilitating self-donation could improve the overall effectiveness of their services.

Our findings extend beyond the educational sector. The principle of self-donation can be applied in various contexts, including political campaigns and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. For instance, political candidates often contribute their own funds to signal their dedication, and companies publicly donate a portion of their profits to enhance their reputations. In each case, self-contribution acts as a powerful indicator of commitment and quality and tends to influence the behavior of others.

Platforms might develop features that make it easier for project stewards to make visible self-donations or to highlight these contributions to potential donors. Additionally, providing guidelines or best practices for teachers on strategically timing their self-donations could maximize impact.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

• The visibility of self-donations is crucial for fundraising. Individuals and organizations should be aware of the risks of anonymous self-donations.

• The frequency, recency, and amount of self-donations should be carefully planned to maximize their impact on fundraising success. Ideally, a single self-donation at the project’s outset can optimize its funding prospects.

• Platforms can highlight self-donations on the project landing page and encourage self-donations during the donation process to increase the project funding rate.

Our research offers valuable insights for teachers, crowdfunding platforms, and other stakeholders involved in online fundraising. By leveraging self-donation as a signaling mechanism, educators can increase their chances of successfully funding their projects, thus enhancing educational experiences for their students. Crowdfunding platforms can improve their services by supporting and promoting self-donation strategies. We encourage all stakeholders to incorporate these findings into their practices to create more successful and impactful fundraising campaigns.

The effects of self-donation may vary in more complex contexts where funds go directly to fundraisers and could raise moral concerns. We encourage scholars to extend our theory by examining the impact of self-donations in other contexts. Future research may also study the dynamic interactions among donors during the donation process.

Source: Zhuping Liu, Qiang Gao, and Raghunath Singh Rao, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Firms frequently launch group-buying promotions that offer a discount when a certain number of buyers commit to the deal. Political parties urge millions of voters to rally around a candidate. Organizations ask individuals for donations to collectively reach a financial target.

When campaigns involve efforts from multiple individuals, marketers seek to tailor the message to persuade them to join the campaign. These collective goals require many people to make a one-off contribution, and people can choose to support the goal at any stage of the completion process—while leaving the final outcome in others’ hands. Specifically, people who contribute money to these causes have no past interaction with the collective goal and, in most cases, cannot put in more effort to ensure its eventual success.

Marketers often disclose information about the remaining distance toward completion when soliciting a contribution in a collective campaign. For example, “$0.86 million has been raised to meet the target of $1 million” or “23,000 people have signed a petition that needs 100,000 participants.” As the remaining distance toward completion changes, the effectiveness of different persuasive messages should change accordingly.

In a , we examine how marketers can use different messaging to persuade people to contribute to a collective goal. Our research team addresses the specific question of the type of message – fact-based vs. affected-based – that is more effective in eliciting participation based on how near the goal is to completion. 

Fact-Based vs. Affect-Based Appeals

Seven studies demonstrate that the relative impact of fact-based versus affect-based appeals changes with varying distance to the completion of the collective goal. We find that when the distance to the completion of a collective goal is large, the path to the end remains uncertain. As a result, people who are deciding whether to contribute to the goal may question if and how the collective goal can be accomplished. This consideration tends to be thinking-oriented and reasoning-based (e.g., “Is this feasible?” or “What needs to be done?”). Thus, fact-based appeals better match consumers’ thinking-oriented psychological state—and are more effective in persuasion.

By comparison, when the collective goal is nearing completion, people tend to base their decision on whether the goal is valuable and worth contributing to. The value assessment usually involves simulating the outcome and imagining the emotional reaction to reaching the goal, a process that relies on feelings and emotions (e.g., “How would I feel about being part of this?”). Therefore, when the distance to the collective goal completion is small, affect-based appeals better match consumers’ feelings-oriented psychological state and should be more effective in persuasion.

The findings in this research advance understanding the effectiveness of persuasive messages in the context of collective goals. Because the distance remaining to completing the goal plays a role in consumers’ psychological state, their tendency to follow a persuasive message depends heavily on whether these messages match their psychological state of thinking or feeling. These conditions require marketers to focus on the audience’s situational psychological state and match it to the appropriate persuasive message.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

This research is particularly relevant in today’s marketplace as social media and digital platforms play an increasingly central role in campaigns. Technology not only enables real-time tracking and sharing of information about the progress toward the goal in collective campaigns but also makes it possible for marketers to change the content of persuasive messages midway through the campaign to suit the context and to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Our findings offer the following key insights for marketers trying to elicit more participation in collective goals:

• The use of fact-based appeals might be more useful early in a collective campaign, but marketers should consider switching to appeals that focus on feelings as the campaign gets closer to the target. For example, when universities ask for donations from alumni to reach a campaign goal, they should consider fact-based messages such as school ranking, educational performance, and information about student and faculty diversity when the fundraising target is still far away. However, they should switch to affect-based appeals and evoke more emotional elaboration as the total amount gets closer to the target.

• Marketers should consider employing an appropriate mix of textual versus visual communication at different stages of their campaigns. Whereas visual illustrations with text and less feeling-based messages may be effective at an early stage of campaigns, marketers may wish to include more affect-rich visuals to evoke stronger emotions to push the goal over the finish line in the more advanced stages. 

From: Liyin Jin, Yajin Wang, and Ying Zhang, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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The findings of this research provide substantive practical implications to policy makers, marketers, and charity organizations by identifying a quite simple and highly actionable strategy to promote charitable giving, that is framing charitable giving as gift rather donation.

Related Marketing Courses:

Digital Marketing; Marketing Analytics; Social Media Marketing

Full Citation:

Wang, Phyllis Xue, Yijie Wang, and Yuwei Jiang (2022), “,” Journal of Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F00222429221081506.

Article Abstract:

The question of how to improve the effectiveness of charitable solicitation has long been a subject of investigation for charity organizations. Through six studies, including four incentive-compatible studies and a field study, the present research demonstrates an easy, actionable, and widely applicable semantic-framing strategy that can be utilized to promote charitable giving. Semantically framing charitable giving as gift (rather than donation) increases not only donors’ intention to contribute but also their actual amount of contribution (Studies 1–3). Both mediation (Study 4) and moderation (Study 5) approaches provide convergent evidence that the effect of framing charitable giving as gift rather than donation on contribution is driven by donors’ perceived social distance from beneficiaries. The authors further find that this framing effect is weakened when soliciting contributions from donors who see social distance as desirable (e.g., those with a high need for status; Study 6). The current work contributes to the literatures on charitable giving, social exchange, and semantic framing, and provides strong managerial implications for charity organizations.

Special thanks to Holly Howe and Demi Oba, PhD candidates at Duke University.

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From: Phyllis Wang, Yijie Wang, and Yuwei Jiang, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Americans have consistently demonstrated generosity with regard to charitable donations. In fact, the United States ranks in the top five nations for giving to charities, collecting close to $300 billion in 2018. However, this constitutes around 2% of the United States’ disposable income, a rather small percentage that has been a consistent limit to U.S. donations for over 40 years. Why does this 2% giving cap exist? What factors are at play here? These questions are significant when we consider that not-for-profits are one of the most important agencies in solving social problems such as poverty, inequality, and pollution at a global level. Our society is rife with not-for-profits that are determined to make a difference in the world but are heavily reliant on their donors. Although not-for-profits take advantage of donation days and various other charitable drives that occur throughout the year, and see higher donations in times of natural disasters, they still struggle with the 2% giving cap. The impact of the current COVID situation on the global society underscores the importance of understanding the drivers of giving behavior and donations and breaking through this giving ceiling.

When someone gives to a good cause, their identity almost becomes tied to that mission. For instance, people donating to a clean water campaign might label themselves environmental activists, while people donating to an inequality campaign may consider themselves humanitarians. But in these two examples, does it matter whether a man or a woman donated to these campaigns? Does gender influence the dollar amounts donated? Shang and colleagues’ addresses these critical questions with regard to charitable donations by positioning their research between the pillars of moral identity, gender, and the role of giving behavior in reducing moral identity discrepancy (the gap between actual and ideal moral identity). The authors’ finding that women (but not men) who are primed with moral traits give approximately 20% more to charitable causes, suggesting gender differences in supporting a not-for-profit mission. Specifically, giving campaigns that shrink this gap between actual and ideal moral identity (in women) can receive more generous donations than campaigns that simply ask for donations.

We reached out to the authors to understand their motivations behind this unique study and to explore their findings in greater detail. We were curious to understand how the authors pinpointed the moral identity between men and women as being the focal point behind the study. The authors, fundamentally, were inspired by classic evolutionary theories of social agency that suggest different motivational drivers for men vs. women to interact with the world around them. For instance, women in traditional “roles” have been socialized over time and rewarded as caretakers and nurturers in their family roles. Research has found that these roles create a tendency to be more “collective.” On the other hand, men tend to be rewarded for their social capital linked to power and wealth creation, and studies show that this relates to a tendency to be more “individualistic.”^[1] This led the authors to wonder whether these differences might potentially lead women and men to respond differently to external triggers and the possible impact on their giving behaviors. The authors were also interested in whether women and men would be differentially sensitive to a moral prime that would invoke thoughts related to kindness, compassion, caring, etc. Furthermore, they wondered if this difference would lead to different experiences among women vs. men with regard to their moral image vs. desired ideal moral image (moral discrepancy). Finally, the authors wanted to examine the impact of this moral discrepancy in terms of marketplace donation behavior and philanthropic giving.

We delved further into gender differences between the giving tendencies of men and women. In the experiments conducted by the authors, donors were thanked for their donation with words of affirmation, like “kind” and “caring.” We wondered whether men were subconsciously averse to this language when describing their actions, such that they might instinctively “swat the hand” that pats them on the head for doing a good job, whereas women view those words of affirmation as encouraging words that reaffirm their groundedness in society. The authors clarified that this “swatting away,” if you will, is not out of stigma, and it may just be that men are not “tuned” to that kind of feedback in the same way women are. Thus, women do not respond in the same way. While the authors do not claim that men do not give, or will not give under other circumstances, they simply explored the differences that may be invoked as a function of exposure to certain cues that may trigger thoughts about kindness, caring, compassion, etc. The authors wanted to see if the difference between how one sees one’s moral image compared to one’s ideal moral image may change as a function of giving, and how that giving may reinforce their identity differently as a function of gender.

When the authors began to uncover the reasons why men and women differ in their giving tendencies, we thought it was wise to discuss related questions for subsequent authors who are looking to research in this area. First, we wanted to know if there might be other underlying mechanisms (apart from encouragement and upliftment) of giving behavior, for instance, social image or social impressions. The authors stressed that additional mechanisms could have to do with personal pride, or what researchers might refer to as an emotion of morality that one may experience. The authors were particularly interested in the concept of “warm glow” (feeling good about yourself because you know that you did something good) and emphasized how giving may solidify one’s status in society. For instance, people may perceive strong philanthropic givers as “established” and there may be external praise heaped upon the giver. While these are just a few possible reasons that can be explored in future research, they may also reveal robust differences in how the genders experience differential giving as a function of external and internal cues.

Second, from a methodological perspective, we wondered how the authors approached the moral identity discrepancy scale development measures. Specifically, we were interested to understand the detailed process required to develop the moral identity discrepancy scale, as well as possible challenges that researchers might encounter in this regard. The authors emphasized that while they were proud of their article in taking baby steps towards a preliminary moral discrepancy measure, more psychometric work needs to be done to develop the scale and ascertain its statistical properties. Although, there is always concern with “social desirability” when asking a person to introspect on how they see themselves as a moral being, the authors believed that the idea of measuring any identity discrepancy (where there may be internal and external factors that shrink and expand such a gap) is indeed a logical next step in research on identity more generally, and more specifically, in research in the moral domain. At the end of the day, the authors felt that the development of a scale would become an empirical question. The authors believed that a scale having robust properties would predict things in a logical and systematic fashion, in much the same way that the moral identity scale by Aquino and Reed (2002) has proven to be able to do.

In the context of donation behavior and philanthropic giving, it was difficult not to touch on the COVID-19 situation, and how that affects businesses around the world, especially not-for-profits who rely on donations to function. The article indicated that a shift in marketing to potential donors was undoubtedly necessary, and we wanted the authors’ views on whether this 2% donation cap can be solved mainly through a shift in marketing tone, for instance, centered around benefiting society at large, benefiting the community in which we operate? Furthermore, it seemed to us like donations go through ups and downs, shifting depending on the world’s events, and time of year. But we wondered whether a mentality shift, where people in our society began to look at charity giving as another monthly budget item that benefited the community they reside in, might create a more significant positive effect for both men and women.

The authors felt that these were interesting potential implications of their research, with the global COVID-19 pandemic possibly leading to very interesting shifts in market donations and giving patterns. The authors felt that this could work both ways. People viewing the global threat as a trigger might choose to give more and more often outside their close circle of moral regard. People could also view this situation in the opposite way, whereby this threat to the common good could trigger a need to protect those that are closest to them and that are most vulnerable in their inner circle. The authors believe that there are probably lots of different moderators at play, including many of the ones studied in their article. According to the authors, marketing tone will play a key role in influencing giving behavior, but so will the way in which the benefactor of the donation is framed to the potential donor.

^[1] We thought it important to clarify the authors’ position here: “We are not saying that men cannot be kind, caring, giving, nurturing, etc., but it is a matter of degree and the external things that trigger potential different amounts of giving for men vs. women might be different.”

Full Article

Shang, Jen, Americus Reed, Adrian Sargeant, and Kathryn Carpenter. “.” Journal of Marketing Research 57, no. 2 (April 2020): 375–93.

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