This research focuses on how and when individuals decide to donate money to social organizations. It focuses on how impersonal solicitations affect this decision, where "impersonal" refers to any donation request via direct mail, e-mail, and telephone (i.e. not via personal acquaintances). Although past research shows that people donate money to social organizations to express support for their goals and activities, this work shows why solicitations that mention such issues can actually decrease people?s willingness to donate money.
To show why, this research synthesizes two ideas from psychology and behavioral economics: (1) people spend money when they are able to justify the expenditure to themselves, and (2) relatively discretionary purchases, such as donations, are hard to justify when people are reminded about their personal financial struggles. Combining these two ideas leads to the following hypothesis: mentioning issues that remind people about their personal financial struggles--such as unemployment, inflation, and unaffordable necessities--diminishes the effectiveness of requests for money, regardless of the importance of such issues. On the other hand, mentioning issues that people care about and do not remind people about their personal financial struggles increases the effectiveness of requests for money.
This work uses several laboratory experiments to test this hypothesis. In all cases subjects are given the opportunity to donate real money to real organizations. Together, the experiments directly test the proposed psychological mechanism. They show that mentioning issues that people care about that remind them about personal financial struggles decreases their willingness to donate money by making it difficult to justify spending money on a donation. In this situation, people instead choose to save their money in order to spend it on necessities. Moreover, the experiments also show that mentioning issues that people care about and do not remind them about personal financial struggles increases their willingness to donate.
By integrating psychological insights within a common social context, this work clarifies how people decide to donate money and how attributes of donation solicitations affect this decision. It provides a foundation for future research on how people decide to donate money to any social organization. More broadly, the insights here show how social organizations can broaden their donor base using impersonal solicitation. To the extent that our democracy benefits from citizens who are engaged and active in various social organizations, understanding the conditions under which solicitations for donations are successful fulfills an essential normative goal.
