Suchergebnisse

Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected pro-sociality among individuals? After the onset of the pandemic, many charitable appeals were updated to include a reference to COVID-19. Did donors increase their giving in response to such changes? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a real-donation online experiment with more than 4200 participants from 149 local areas in England and over 21 weeks. First, we varied the fundraising appeal to either include or exclude a reference to COVID-19. We found that including the reference to COVID-19 in the appeal increased donations. Second, in a natural experiment-like approach, we studied how the relative local severity of the pandemic and media coverage about local COVID-19 severity affected giving in our experiment. We found that both higher local severity and more related articles increased giving of participants in the respective areas. This holds for different specifications, including specifications with location fixed effects, time fixed effects, a broad set of individual characteristics to account for a potentially changing composition of the sample over time and to account for health- and work-related experiences with and expectations regarding the pandemic. While negative experiences with COVID-19 correlate negatively with giving, both approaches led us to conclude that the pure effect of increased salience of the pandemic on pro-sociality is positive. Despite the shift in public attention toward the domestic fight against the pandemic and away from developing countries' challenges, we found that preferences did not shift toward giving more to a national project and less to developing countries.

Supporting data for the article "Quality certifications for nonprofits, charitable giving, and donor's trust: experimental evidence".

In an experiment, we test the impact of quality certificates on donations to a charity. Compared to the control group, participants presented with a quality certificate chose higher donations by around 10% and reported higher trust towards the same charity. The choice of donation values over time shows strong persistence such that the difference between the two groups remained even after all participants were informed about the certificate. Since the initially uninformed donors did not adjust their donations sufficiently upwards, we conclude that quality certification is less likely to affect giving of existing donors. Finally, we find no significant effect of information about certificate fees.