[cross-post] Does donation matching work?

Thanks for working on this.

I don't know if this is addressed in the literature, but what is your best guess for the large discrepancy between how many people say they are influenced by the match and the numbers you were finding?

A secondary thought is that I think I would expect the effect of the match to be stronger on social media due to the eye-catching effect. Though I would certainly have expected stronger effects (maybe 75%) from the studies. Almost all of the money raised on my match so far has been via the 'passive' social media exposure, rather than actively contacting people.

On a personal level, I don't like fundraising on a gut level in the first place (I put it 'necessary evil' territory). The match makes me feel less bad about it, which is probably worth something if possibly not much.

My prior here is that donation matching must be relatively effective because mainstream charities use it somewhat extensively. One thing that I would emphasise is that it's a very very easy way for large donors to have (or at least fell like they have - which is very valuable for charities dealing with large donors) a "bonus" effect with their donations, it takes little resources or time and is neutral (if the matched funds are precommitted not like from a commercial sponsor). Other schemes big charities use (auctions, reinvestmentet in marketing) are a lot more complex and potentially require greater donor interaction and day to day commitment

I do think the research makes a very good point about more than 1:1matching - that seems to be a real diminishing return that should be avoided.

This is really strong, surprised I didn't see it before! This is the sort of work I'm hoping to do/coalesce in the "Increasing effective charitable giving" synthesis (but with a focus on the particular effectiveness-relevant stuff) ... and also in innovationsinfundraising.org, an earlier project.

I haven't read your full write-up, but what I see makes this my 'go-to' response on the 'matching donations' questions that comes up all the time.

I was going to make the point that @cflexman does below: introducing a "you can offer a match policy" might increase net donations if we also consider the impact of such a policy on the donations of the person induced to do the matching.

I made a link instead of pasting the whole thing here because I expect I'll update the post and don't want to deal with keeping the two versions synchronized.

I think this reduced the probability I read the piece by around 50%.

(Note: I made a link instead of pasting the whole thing here because I expect I'll update the post and don't want to deal with keeping the two versions synchronized. Moderators, let me know if you'd prefer some other solution.)

Just listen to the upvotes, Ben! I imagine people generally like having to click one less time, but don't care about it nearly as much of quality of content.