Acquiring New Donors

Abstract

There is a rich literature on charitable giving which considers incentives applied to existing and potential donors. We contribute to current field experiment research in two important ways. First, we establish results for the impact of incentives on acquisition of new donors for organizations that do not have clearly partisan appeal, unlike much of the existing work. Second, we consider the influence of incentive gifts, which we term bonus trigger gifts. We find that promising that a bonus gift of $10 will be added to each donation significantly influences the acquisition and behavior of new donors. Although the $1 and $5 incentive conditions do not affect the response of potential donors, the promise of the $10 bonus increased the likelihood of acquiring a new donor and likely changed the distribution of the new donors’ gifts.