Fundraising & "Nudge" - how to get people to give more tomorrow...

Following on from my review of 'Nudge' by Thaler & Sunstein, here is one way the ideas in the book can improve your fundraising. This example uses a nudge to encourage people to increase the value of their regular giving to a charity.

It was based on a fascinating bit of research by Anna Breman at the Stockholm School of Economics. You can read the full paper here.

She discovered that when people were asked to 'Give more tomorrow' i.e. increase their regular donation in the future, they were far more likely to do so than when they were asked to do it now. In fact, the people asked to increase their donations in the future gave 32% more than those asked to do it straight away.

This experiment shows what behavioural economists call 'present-bias preferences'. In simple terms this means we often tend to procrastinate on doing things that have an immediate cost but only produce longer term benefits.

I'm certainly going to experiment with this within my own charity and include a box on our regular giving forms asking people to opt in to increase their direct debit by £1 per month every 3/6/12 months (their choice).

It would only need a small percentage of donors to opt in to doing this to make a significant increase to our regular giving and would dramatically reduce the costs of upgrade mailings, phone calls etc, which can only be a good thing.

The book also has a number of other good ideas that can be applied to fundraising and I'd highly recommend it.