Unit Asking: A Method to Boost Donations and Beyond

Raising charitable donations requires considerable time and effort. In the U.S., for example, it costs over $50 billion each year to raise roughly $300 billion in individual donations (Greenfield, 1999; National Philanthropic Fund, 2012). In this research, we introduce a simple and virtually costless method for boosting donations. To illustrate, consider a web-based fundraiser that solicits donations to help N needy persons. Imagine two alternative versions of the website: One version asks the donors to decide how much to donate for all of the N persons. The other version first asks the respondents a hypothetical question—how much they would donate for one of the N persons—and then asks them to decide how much to donate for all of the N persons. Notice that the second version merely adds a hypothetical question that carries no additional external information. Yet we propose that this hypothetical question will considerably boost donations. We refer to this effect as the unit-asking effect. The unit-asking effect occurs because donors are initially scope insensitive (Hsee, 1996; Hsee & Zhang, 2010); thus, the willingness to-donate (WTD) donors in the unit-asking condition indicate for one needy person would be similar to the WTD donors in the control condition indicate for all of the N needy persons. When the donors in the unit-asking condition are subsequently asked to decide on their WTD for all of the N needy persons after having indicated their WTD for one needy person, their desire for consistency will compel them to contribute more for the N persons than for one person. Thus, donors in the unit-asking condition will donate more money than will those in the control condition, resulting in a unit-asking effect.