Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: A Field Experiment Encouraging Donors to Share About Charity

Sharing about charity online or in personal conversations can help raise awareness and bolster fundraising efforts for good causes. However, when deciding whether to tell others about their charitable giving, donors may focus more on possible risks to their reputation (e.g., of seeming braggy, inauthentic) than on potential word-of-mouth benefits for the charity. In a large, preregistered field experiment, we tested a post-donation intervention designed to encourage word-of-mouth by reorienting donors to the idea that sharing about charity means doing more good; 77,485 donors received either a control or treatment message asking them to share a link to the cause via social media, text, or email. Compared with the organization’s standard solicitation (“Please share your donation…”), our intervention emphasized consequences of sharing for the cause (“Your donation can start a chain reaction…”). This brief message increased click-through by 5.1% and likelihood of recruiting at least one later donation via word-of-mouth by 12.4%. Exploratory follow-up analyses suggest that these effects are most pronounced among larger-gift donors; the more donors gave, the more responsive they were to the intervention. Whereas many field experiments aim to increase giving directly, we test an intervention designed to boost word-of-mouth for worthy causes. We discuss approaches for encouraging sharing in the domain of charity and beyond.

History: Olivier Toubia served as the senior editor for this article.

Supplemental Material: The e-companion and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2023.1450.