Micro Seminars EUR

Speaker(s)
Sarah Smith (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
Date
Friday, May 22, 2015
Location
Rotterdam

Targets are ubiquitous in charitable fundraising campaigns. Often these are notional and non-binding, reflecting aspirational fundraising goals, rather than specific project funding costs. This paper provides new evidence on the effect of such goals on fundraising outcomes, reporting the results of a field experiment with variation in default fundraising target values for individual fundraisers. First, we show that default fundraising targets affect fundraiser behaviour, increasing the proportion of fundraisers who set a target and changing the distribution of target values. Second we show that default target values increase aggregate donations, but that the effect is small. We highlight a number of possible reasons for the small effect. First, low target values can reduce the total amount raised, particularly at the top of the distribution. Second, while fundraisers “bunch” at the target,nearly 95% fundraisers raise a total that differs to their target value. Third, targets appear to have no effect on donations for female fundraisers.