Beyond the Ice Bucket Challenge

Ask for help, rather than donations

People like to help others out, but they don’t like to think they’re losing something in the process. So framing supporters’ involvement as helping, rather than giving, can increase what people will do for the charity and how meaningful the involvement feels.

Giving and helping rely on two distinct psychological processes. Some studies have discovered that altruism—acting purely to help others—is not a particularly important motivator for adults. In the lab, for example, when asked to dole out a pot of money, most only give 10–30 percent of the total away, and this number goes way down when controlling for ulterior motives. Some psychologists even argue that if we were to ignore social pressure to give, donations would fall to zero. Helping, on the other hand, feels a lot better than giving. And unlike giving, it has been linked in studies to a range of positive effects, from better physical and mental health to a sense of meaningfulness.

Booth graduate student Adelle X. Yang, working with Urminsky and Hsee, teased apart how people’s desire to give, and their separate desire to help, impact their donations.

The research team conducted a study in which participants fished coins out of a bowl. They asked one group to perform the task for charity, and they asked another group to perform the task for themselves, but with the option of giving any money they made to charity. The first group was essentially tasked with the option of “helping” a charity through their actions, and the second with the option of “giving” money to the charity.

“We expected them to work harder to earn money for themselves, particularly since they could also donate if they wanted to,” says Urminsky. “So it’s surprising that we found the same thing over and over again: that people actually worked much harder for charity.”

People preferred to help the charity rather than simply give to it. More evidence of that: in a related experiment, the researchers again asked a group of participants to do a task for charity—in this case to punch holes in a card, for 1 cent per hole punched—but they told these participants that others in the same situation had received the option of keeping the money for themselves. This time, people doing the task for charity seem not to have worked as hard, as they punched fewer holes than those not told of an alternate situation. Did priming them to feel selfish drown out their selfless impulses? “In a sense,” the researchers write, “the ‘warm glow’ shines brighter on its own—once self-interest enters into consideration, the cold glint of gold can outshine the ‘warm glow.’”

Other research has found that self-interest rears its head as monetary stake’s get higher. Carnegie Mellon’s Alex Imas found, as Urminsky did, that people are initially more willing to undertake tasks for charity than for themselves. But when the amount at stake—either to be donated or kept—grows, people work much harder for themselves.

Knowing what the payoff is ahead of time influences whether people choose to work for themselves or for charity. When study participants were told they’d either be working for high or low stakes, and then were asked whether they wanted to keep or donate the money they earned for participating in the study, people in the high-stakes group chose to work for themselves more often, while those in the low-stakes group chose to work for charity.

“I found that people work harder for greater incentives when that money goes to them directly, but do not respond to an increase in incentives when the cash is donated to charity,” says Imas. “This results in a pattern where at low incentives, people work harder for charity; at high incentives, they work harder for themselves.”

He also points out that the study is good evidence for warm-glow motivation, where people give because giving feels good, not to achieve a better outcome for the recipients. One implication of warm-glow giving: when the stakes grow larger, people work less hard for charity.

The message for fund-raisers may be that it’s important to keep the notion of helping at the forefront. Urminsky says whatever you do, don’t frame the act of donating as a monetary sacrifice. “If I can just do it without thinking about what I’m giving up, it’s much better.”

Change how people view themselves

If keeping selfish thoughts at bay is one important factor, a related aspect of that is removing the “self” from the donation equation, or manipulating how we view it. Daniel Bartels, assistant professor of marketing and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth, and his collaborators, Trevor Kvaran and Shaun Nichols from the University of Arizona, asked people how much they felt their life and identity would change over time. Then they asked people how much of a bonus payment they’d want to donate to the Save the Children foundation. People who anticipated a lot of personal change over the next year were more charitable with future funds—bonus payments slated to be received in a year—than people who felt they’d be largely the same.

In other studies, the researchers manipulated how much personal change the participants could anticipate by having them read studies about how personalities either change or remain stable over time. People induced to believe that people change over time were more likely to give future funds—paid out in a year—than people induced to believe personalities remain stable. And people who anticipated feeling more connected to other people in the future, as opposed to their future selves, were also more likely to donate. “For example, if I think I’m more connected to Jane now than I am to myself in 30 years, then I’ll be more likely give more to Jane now,” says Bartels.

Asking people to think about the future self is a recurring theme in Bartels’s work, and in this research, thinking about personal change diminishes the role of self-interest and, thus, helps people act on their other, more selfless values.

Bartels suggests that foundations could ask potential donors to think further out: “Either placing an allocation out in time, or suggesting to people that their future self is, in some sense, not exactly like their current self might potentially increase people’s willingness to give these future funds away to others.”

Make that fund-raiser seem exceptional

Abigail Sussman, assistant professor of marketing at Chicago Booth, along with Eesha Sharma of Dartmouth College and Adam Alter of NYU, finds that minor differences in the way a charity frames its donation plea, as either a regular occurrence or an exceptional one, can make a big difference in how likely people are to donate.

When it comes to everyday budgeting, people have a difficult time seeing some expenses, such as birthday presents, as fitting into any one category of expenses. Sussman finds that this makes people spend more on those items—if something doesn’t fit neatly into an existing budget category, people are more flexible in terms of how much they’ll spend on it.

In the context of charitable giving, the researchers altered the wording in online ads for the Alzheimer’s Association’s annual charity walk, so that one ad read, “Held annually for Alzheimer’s,” while another read, “Only once a year for Alzheimer’s.” The first indicated the walk was a regular occurrence, while the second indicated it was an exceptional event.

People were more likely to click through and donate for the latter, when the walk appeared to be an exceptional rather than a regular occurrence. Follow-up studies showed the same phenomenon, and when participants were queried about their budgeting process, “people reported being less likely to consider the impact on their budget when the event seemed to be exceptional,” says Sussman.

These findings support a fund-raising strategy different from the “pennies-a-day” strategy, which encourages people to give a very modest amount on a daily basis, rather than a larger amount all at once. This daily breakdown works well when the total can be divided into small amounts that people essentially round to zero, says Sussman. But it is generally ineffective for larger sums. For those, framing the donation as a one-off occurrence may be more productive.

Since charities rely on continued donation, how exceptional can each event seem over time? Sussman suggests that when trying to recruit new donors, highlight what is new and unlikely to recur. If you find yourself promoting an annual charity walk for the 27th time, for example, consider highlighting a particular band that will be performing during the event.

What wealthy donors like to hear

Thomas Piketty, the Paris School of Economics professor whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century was an unexpected best seller, argues that we’re living in a second belle époque. Concentrated wealth has created a new class of philanthropists, some of whom have signed a pledge to give away their fortunes during their lifetimes. But unfortunately for fund-raisers, that may be an anomaly: some research suggests that wealthy individuals are less likely than people with moderate incomes to donate money. A report released in October from the Chronicle of Philanthropy provides more supporting evidence of that: the Chronicle found that Americans earning $200,000 or more annually reduced the share of income they donated by 4.6 percent from 2006 to 2012, while Americans earning less than $100,000 raised theirs by 4.5 percent.