People can be incredibly generous when it comes to giving money to good causes – 50-70% of Western individuals donate to charity in any given month, and charitable giving is increasing in all world economy types (1). In the USA alone, over $350 billion was donated to charitable organisations in 2014, which represents around 2% of GDP (2). As anyone who has ever worked in a charity will tell you however, more money is always needed!

Luckily, science is once again there to lend a hand. Charities can use psychological insights in their campaigns to increase donations. Some are obvious – use bright colours, large font sizes, and interesting pictures to attract attention. After all, people can’t donate if they don’t even notice the advertisement in the first place. Contextual factors also matter. For instance, people often give more when their donation is relatively visible (3), and have been shown to give more when asked by attractive fundraisers (4,5). Below are two slightly more detailed examples from my recently accepted paper.

EXAMPLE 1: Identifiable victim effect

How you present the recipient matters. People are more willing to help a single, identified victim than unidentified or statistical ones. In other words, you’ll have more luck pleading the case of a little boy named Jamal from Iraq, than you would trying to raise funds to help all the children in Iraq. Why this is the case is unclear. Perhaps the specificity and vividness of Jamal produces a greater empathetic response, or maybe people just feel like they can make more of an impact by donating to a single individual rather than splitting their donation up amongst many individuals. Either way, the identifiable victim effect has been well-documented in laboratory and field experiments where humans are the victims, but not with non-human species. To our surprise, we found that people did not donate more when presented with single identifiable beneficiaries (e.g. Rosie the polar bear) rather than groups of beneficiaries (e.g. polar bears in general.)

EXAMPLE 2: Flagship species

Who you choose as your recipient also matters. People have a bias towards flagship species, generally popular, charismatic vertebrae that can serve as a focal point for a campaign, such as elephants or tigers. There’s a reason the WWF logo is a panda and not an ant. There is some debate about the definition of a flagship species and the ethics of promoting them at the expense of other species but as our research shows, they can quantifiably increase donations to an appeal compared to non-flagship species.

But beware, it is still important to empirically verify results from a behavioural science study conducted in one context before trying to use them in a different context. As we have just discovered with appeals featuring single, identified animals, the results from studies with human subjects may not necessarily be extrapolated to animal subjects.

References

Charities Aid Foundation, 2015. CAF World Giving Index 2015. American Association of Fundraising Counsel Trust for Philanthropy, 2015. Giving USA 2015: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2014, Indianapolis. Soetevent, A.R., 2005. Anonymity in giving in a natural context – A field experiment in 30 churches. Journal of Public Economics, 89(11-12), pp.2301–2323. Landry, C. et al., 2013. Toward an understanding of the economics of charity: Evidence from a field experiment. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 53(9), pp.1689–1699. Raihani, N.J. & Smith, S., 2015. Competitive helping in online giving. Current Biology, 25(9), pp.1183–1186.