Effortful but Valuable: How Perceptions of Effort Affect Charitable Gift Choice and Valuations of Charity

There has been a recent trend in charitable giving, in which increasing number of donors are requesting that their donations be used for a specific initiative, instead of being directed to a charity’s general, unrestricted fund. Although consumers’ decision to make a restricted or unrestricted charitable donation directly affects how charities function and operate, no research has yet examined what affects consumers’ donation choice and why. We propose that although targeting a donation to a specific initiative enhances preference matching, consumers concurrently perceive the process of choosing among several charitable initiatives as being difficult. Thus, we predicted that the extent to which consumers are focused on the procedural difficulty of an action should affect the likelihood of them making a restricted or unrestricted donation. Specifically, when consumers increase their focus on action feasibility, they’re more likely to delegate their gift choice to charity, thereby make unrestricted donations. Such tendency should be considerably reduced as consumers increase their focus on action desirability. Furthermore, based on previous work that people often derive value from investing effort (Loewenstein, 1999), we anticipated that consumers who make restricted charitable donations, thus have exerted more cognitive effort to identify a particular designation of their contributions, would attach a greater value to the charity post-giving, than consumers who make unrestricted charitable donations.