CHARITY SCIENCE FOUNDATION
  • Donate

The power of donation matching

9/29/2014

6 Comments

 
One thing we experimented with was running a large donation match both during our event and our last 6 months of fundraising. We found the donation match was extremely helpful in encouraging others to donate and somewhat helpful in allowing us to track our impact. The three largest benefits that the donation match produced are listed below:

1) It created a sense of urgency. Many donors felt as though they wanted to donate but had put it off indefinitely, sometimes for years. The match made them feel as though now was a good time instead of waiting until later or forgetting again.
2) It created a sense of achievement. Many of the people who donated to the Charity Science Walk felt much more accomplished in their fundraising when they saw that it got doubled. I think this ended up motivating several to fundraise or donate more.

Below is a graph of donations per day for the event. The huge spike on September 8th is the day when we started applying the match to individual fundraisers’ pages. We talked about it before, but seeing it on their own pages made a huge difference. The match itself is not tracked on this graph; it just shows that new donations increasing substantially once they see the match happening. 
Picture
3) It created a sense of increased impact. People felt like they were saving more lives per dollar. It made effective charities seem even stronger compared to standard charities.

Overall the match was extremely valuable. We feel that about half of all the donations made were significantly affected by the match. Many people actively commented that they were donating because of it. Because of this we will likely aim to have a match running for every major event in the future.

     The total amount that was matched

We raised $22,987 for effective charities that we are confident would not have been donated otherwise. We excluded just over $5,875 ($11,750 if matched) of donations that we feel could not be counterfactually attributed to Charity Science and did not count any donations that we suspected happened but did not have concrete proof of (eg. donation receipts).

We also suspect some more money will be donated over the next few months inspired by the event, but we do not have good confidence in this amount so it was not included. We feel that if we used a less stringent tracking system this number could be well above $30,000. 

Below is a graph of money moved each month to effective charities, including the match and not including operating expenses. We feel that the total depicted for September is slightly lower than it will be as this data was collected before the end of the month.


6 Comments
Gina Stuessy
10/24/2014 11:02:20 am

I'm curious where you got the matching donor? Did one or more of your staff/volunteers supply the matching donations?

Reply
Joey
10/24/2014 11:55:36 am

The match was provided by a few EAs who approached us about potential high impact opportunities. We suggested the match while talking about different options. They were not staff, volunteers or board members.

Reply
Ben Kuhn link
1/2/2015 10:28:57 am

Hi Joey--I ran across this post while doing my own research on donation matching and have some questions.

First, to what extent do you think this could be a result of confounding? For instance, did people start promoting their fundraisers more after you secured the match?

With regard to the second graph, was the match retroactive? That is, would the graph of funds not including the match look exactly the same (but scaled by a factor of two), or would the September total be half as high as it is and everything else be unchanged?

Finally, was daily money moved for the first three weeks of August as low as it was for the fourth week according to the first graph? That would seem inconsistent with the monthly totals you provided with the second graph, since it looks like the second week of September moved about 5x as much as the last week of August, but during the month of September, total donations looked to be more like 2x those for August.

Thanks!
Ben

Reply
Joey
1/2/2015 11:16:41 am

Hey Ben,

So I suspect that people did promote their fundraisers more as time went on but I have no explanation for the large jump that happened that day. I would have expected a more gradual curve upwards as the month went on.

"the graph of funds not including the match look exactly the same (but scaled by a factor of two)" This is correct.

The first graph is only of money donated specifically to the CS walk while the second graph includes all money moved via CS, including the walk. That is why the numbers/trends are really different. If I recall correctly we had a few successful birthday fundraisers in both August and September.

Reply
Ben Kuhn link
1/10/2015 05:43:11 am

Sorry Joey, I didn't see your response until now. Thanks for answering my questions!

Steve Smith link
3/10/2023 03:44:28 pm

It's interesting when you said that having a donation campaign could help provide a spark to the people who want to help other people. My best friend mentioned yesterday that he was planning to give back to the people for his 30th birthday. He was looking for a non-profit organization that he could support to fight hunger in India. I'm thankful for this instructive article. I'll tell him he can consult the charity that helps people by consulting their website to gather details about them.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Technical blog

    This is a blog that details our month to month organizational progress as well as the more technical ideas we have. The RSS feed is just for this content, not for normal blog content.

    RSS Feed

Charity Science is a foundation registered in Canada under the legal name “Charity Science Foundation of Canada”.
​Our charity number is 80963 6236 RR0001.
Our privacy policy can be found here.

  • Donate