Does irritation induced by charitable direct mailings reduce donations?

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Abstract

Charities rely mainly on direct mailings to attract the attention of potential donors. Individuals may feel irritated by these mailings, in particular when they receive many mailings. This might harm the revenues charities receive from their mailing activities. Moreover, target selection by charities likely results in many mailings being sent to the best donors, and hence they might become most irritated. As such, irritation with direct mailings could well be endogenously determined. To ensure exogenous variation in irritation, we performed a unique controlled field experiment in cooperation with five of the largest charities in the Netherlands. Our analysis reveals that direct mailings do result in irritation, but surprisingly, this irritation affects neither stated nor actual donating behavior.

Introduction

Charities rely heavily on direct mailings to attract the attention of potential donors. Billboard, television and radio advertising, as well as online activities, are also used, but direct mailings by far outnumber other commercial efforts. Much attention is paid to the design of the printed material, especially the catch phrases and the wording used. The careful attention paid to the content of solicitation letters, however, has not been able to avoid a strong association between charitable direct mailings and what is known as “junk mail”. The large number of charities sending out direct mailings, in conjunction with the volumes at which they do this, results in self-stated annoyance towards the charities and their direct mailing activities for more than 60% of the population (NFP Synergy, 2004, TNS NIPO, 2003). Although people often see the value of charities, they also believe the charities are overdoing it and wasting paper and time.

A potential consequence of irritation is that individuals cut their donations to charity or even stop donating completely. Obviously, and most importantly, this would reduce revenues. Another effect is that the databases of charities could become less useful for future target selection. Therefore, it is important for charities to understand the consequences of people becoming irritated. Existing literature only provides evidence for charitable direct mail irritation, but there is no detailed study on its behavioral consequences, especially regarding actual donating behavior. Diamond and Noble (2001) did come close, using a survey to elicit respondents' general response behavior towards direct mailings.

Although data collection through a survey is a natural strategy to measure levels of irritation and response behavior, there also is a clear drawback to this approach. Indeed, individuals may misrepresent their actual behavior, as answers to questions on how much people actually donate could be subject to a social desirability bias (Burt & Popple, 1998). In addition, individuals might not recall exactly how many mailings they received. To address these drawbacks, the approach we take in this paper is to compare stated measures of irritation with actual donating behavior. Moreover, since charities compete and individuals may receive multiple mailings from multiple charities in short stretches of time, we have designed a natural field experiment in which we created controlled variation in the number of mailings individuals receive. This permitted us to investigate the impact of direct mailings and irritation in a realistic setting within the appropriate subject pool (see List & Reiley, 2008). To carry out this natural field experiment, we obtained the cooperation of five of the largest charities in the Netherlands.

To ensure a proper causal interpretation of the relationships among mail pressure, irritation and behavior, we ensured that our dependent variables relate to the future, compared to the timing of the measurement of the corresponding independent variables. More specifically, we first carried out the field experiment to create exogenous variation in mail pressure. We then measured irritation with a survey, in which irritation is a potential consequence of increased mail pressure. Finally, we analyzed the effect of irritation on behavior in a period following the survey. Combining the aforementioned sources of information, properly spaced in time, provided us with a unique database. Moreover, our analysis resulted in a surprising conclusion. While people do claim that they get irritated by direct mailings and more irritated by more mailings, such irritation affects neither stated nor actual donating behavior.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Before revealing our data analysis and results, we first provide a discussion of the relevant literature. Then, we discuss the data collection and our statistical methodology. After studying the potential impact of mere-measurement effects, we conclude with a discussion of the main results.

Section snippets

Background

Potential donors nowadays feel overwhelmed by the great number of direct mailings from many different charities (Abdy and Barclay, 2001, Sargeant and Kähler, 1999); this may lead to “donor fatigue” (Andreoni, 2006). The term “junk mail” surfaces frequently in reference to direct mailings. These unwanted pieces of mail may cause irritation which, in turn, could influence behavior, for example by reducing charitable donations.

Over the past few decades, companies have continuously increased their

Data

We created a unique data set by combining data from three different sources. The three sources all address a specific problem inherent to this type of study and subject matter. First, to avoid social desirability bias, which is a common problem when measuring social behavior such as charitable donating, we needed objective behavioral data on actual levels of giving. Second, in order to solve potential endogeneity issues, that is, people who donate more are also likely selected for a next round

Empirical results

To uncover the relationships between charitable direct mailings, irritation and donating behavior we estimated various models. The first relates irritation associated with charitable direct mailings to the received number of these mailings. Thus, we studied the effect of charitable mailings on irritation. Do more mailings indeed lead to more irritation? Or are people simply irritated with charitable requests in general, no matter how many mailings they receive? Next, we estimated a model for

Discussion and conclusion

The main conclusions from our study can be easily summarized. Individuals feel irritated by the number and frequency of charitable direct mailings, but these negative feelings are not propagated into either stated or actual donating behavior. We could obtain these clear-cut findings due to the fact that five of the largest charities in the Netherlands allowed us to control in a field experiment the number of mailings that individuals received. In contrast, in a non-experimental setting one

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  • Cited by (0)

    We would like to thank the charitable organizations that cooperated in the field experiment, Acxiom Netherlands, Jacoline Brouwer and Peter Exterkate for assistance in data preparation and the editor, area editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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