Have you ever made a donation and been asked to share the news of your donation on social media? For many of us, the proposition is a bit bleak – even though we know that charities really benefit from word of mouth marketing. After all, there is a risk that your followers will I think of you as a braggart or as someone who directs selfless acts for personal gain.
Fortunately, Ike Silver, assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg, has identified a way around this conundrum. By reframing the request to share as a way to advance the cause, Silver’s research shows, charities can overcome the “ick” factor and get more donors to spread the word.
In one experiment, Silver and his co-author partnered with DonorsChoose.org, a platform that supports classrooms in underfunded public schools in the United States. When donors give through the site, they are met with a pop-up thanking them for their donation and asking them to post about it on social media.
Half of the donors saw the site’s standard message: “Share this class with your family and friends.” The other half saw a new message: “Your donation can start a chain reaction, but only if you tell others about the cause. Share this class with your family and friends.”
The research team found that donors who saw the new message were five percent more likely to click on a social media icon. Crucially for the schools, the authors also found that because it increased sharing, the treatment message prompted greater donor recruitment and raised more money overall.
So don’t be shy about speaking up when donating. In fact, Silver will be there with you. “As I study it more and more, I feel more willing to go out for charities that I care about,” he says. “I feel some concern about that, but my own research shows that the causes we care about lose when we’re not willing to support them.”
If you’ve ever shopped with a company that promises to donate one product for every one sold, you’ve experienced what researchers call “giving by proxy.”
This practice has grown in popularity, with companies such as Bomba’s, Tom’s and Warby Parker making charitable donations, in cash or in kind, on behalf of consumers. Giving by Proxy has even extended outside of the retail context, with some companies hanging on to the promise of a charitable gift as an incentive for strong employee performance.
And it turns out that giving by proxy creates more giving. A 2023 study by Maryam Kouchaki, professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, found that people are more favorable after a proxy giving experience. “There’s a spillover effect,” he says.
Koutsaki and her colleagues uncovered this phenomenon in several experiments, including one used by Amazon now defunct AmazonSmile program. Under this program, customers made purchases on a look-alike website, AmazonSmile.com, where the purchases benefited a charity of their choice.
The researchers gave participants an Amazon gift card and asked them to choose one of six items to purchase. Half of the participants (the proxy giving group) were told they would make the purchase through AmazonSmile and were given a brief description of the program, while the rest were simply directed to Amazon.
Participants were then informed that they would be entered into a drawing to win $50. If they won the lottery, they could either keep the winnings or donate half to a charity of their choice.
Participants were significantly more likely to donate potential raffle winnings to charity in the AmazonSmile group than in the control group.
The message is clear: giving by proxy makes us want to give more.
Literally cool, that is. Other research by Kouhakis found that prosocial behavior suffers during heat waves.
An experiment included in the 2017 study involved students enrolled in two different sections of the same undergraduate course. One section met in a comfortable, air-conditioned room that was 69 degrees Fahrenheit, while the other met in a room that reached 80 degrees.
Students in both classrooms were asked to volunteer a 150-question survey, ostensibly to help a non-profit organization. Because the survey was so long, they were told they could stop whenever they wanted.
The temperature of the room made a big difference in the amount of help students were willing to offer: students in the comfortable classroom answered an average of 35 questions, while students in the steam room answered only 6 on average.
When it comes to helping, then, unexpected contextual factors matter more than you might think. “There was the perspective that there are good and bad people,” Kouhaki says, “but we’re showing that something outside of people’s control affects their decisions.”
Another factor that can affect donations: how you ask. It turns out that people are more likely to engage in virtuous behavior when they make their choices on paper than when they use a digital device—a pattern Rima Touré-Tillery, an associate professor of marketing at Kellogg, and her co-author dubbed “good on paper » effect.
As part of the study, the research team approached 200 adults walking in the center of a large American city and asked them to fill out a survey. Half of the participants were given pen and paper to complete the survey and the other half an iPad. Both versions used a similar layout and font.
At the end of the research, they saw a charity appeal from a non-profit organization called No Kid Hungry. Participants were given the option to provide their email address to receive more information on how to donate. The researchers used this choice—either to provide an email address—as an indicator of their virtuous behavior.
There was a notable difference in response rates between paper and tablet surveys: 20 percent of pen and paper participants provided their email address, compared to just 7 percent of tablet participants. “That was a pretty strong result,” says Touré-Tillery.
But what’s great about paper? Touré-Tillery found that what we do on paper is more real than what we do on a digital device — “and because it’s more real, it’s more consequential,” she explains, and therefore matters more to our perception of ourselves.
Of course, there is an environmental cost to such use, so Touré-Tillery suggests that charities think strategically about when to use paper—and, perhaps, how to make their virtual communications feel more impactful and personal: “Anything that makes the experience to feel more real and more self-diagnostic should produce more generous behavior.”
We intuitively understand that a ball thrown directly into our face hurts more if thrown from a few feet away than from the other side of the baseball diamond. The closer the target, the greater the impact.
Surprisingly, the same logic applies to charitable donation decisions, according to other Touré-Tillery research. When people see their donation recipients up close, they believe their donations will have more impact and are more likely to open their wallets. Importantly, Touré-Tillery and her collaborator found that it is the perception of proximity that matters. the actual distance is insignificant.
For example, in one experiment, 160 online participants were given the chance to win a $20 prize. One group read and retyped a paragraph on globalization that described how new technology had made the world shrink and noted that “No country, city, town or village is too far away.” Another group copied a paragraph that emphasized the opposite idea: a description of long-distance flights traversing “a great circle along the diameter of the Earth.” Participants were then asked if they would donate $10 of their potential raffle winnings to an Ivorian charity. About half of the people who had read about globalization agreed to donate, while only about a third of those who had read about long flights did so.
Ultimately, the study suggests that changing the perception of distance can influence people’s decisions to give—even if actual proximity hasn’t changed. Organizations might consider crafting their appeals to make the recipients seem closer to home. For example, an international charity could designate a local branch as the point of contact for donations.
“Any way you can frame the recipient as close to the donor can only help,” says Touré-Tillery.
