When Do Equity Appeals Increase Giving? Evidence from Educational Crowdfunding

Educational crowdfunding platforms seek to reduce funding disparities by directing financial support from a broad donor base to disadvantaged students. One approach to achieving this goal is through attentional interventions highlighting student needs, but their effectiveness remains uncertain. Using data from DonorsChoose.org, we examine the impact of such an intervention—the “equity focus” project label—which signals student disadvantage based on poverty and racial minority status. Employing a regression discontinuity design that leverages arbitrary cutoffs in label assignment, we find that although the equity focus label increases fundraising for disadvantaged students, its impact is largely driven by projects signaling poverty, with only a marginal effect when highlighting racial minority status. These differences in effectiveness appear to be influenced, in part, by the social identities of local donors. Schools in lower-income zip codes tend to attract more donations when projects highlight poverty, whereas schools in racially diverse areas benefit more from projects emphasizing racial minority status. Political ideology also plays a role. Although both liberal and conservative communities respond positively to poverty-focused labels, only liberal areas show increased support for projects that highlight racial minority status. In contrast, conservative areas exhibit little to no response—and in some cases, even a negative response. Our findings highlight the importance of carefully designing equity focus fundraising strategies as simply drawing attention to student disadvantage does not guarantee increased support.

History: Juan Feng, Senior Editor; Tianshu Sun, Associate Editor.

Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the COR Research Fellowship and the Newcomb Institute Faculty Research Grant at Tulane University. These awards supported research activities including data collection and analysis. The authors also thank their institutions for ongoing research support.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2024.1190.