Before I answer, let’s take a small step back…

As fundraisers, we employ different techniques to motivate people to give. But, as we explained before, there’s good and bad motivation. We can definitely make people give by triggering controlled motivation e.g. if you don’t give, this child will starve.  But that’s not the goal. Why? Because if you feel pressured to give, chances are you won’t give again.

The ideal scenario is we market to people who already have some internal, innate reason to support our mission. These people have the potential to be our most satisfied, most profitable donors, and our only job is to promote their autonomous motivation.

What is that? Their sense of autonomy and free-will. Those who have an innate, personal connection to your cause will choose to support you more often than not. But they will do that more often than they are doing it now, if your communications promote their innate reason for support and we suggest, or even explicitly state, the simple fact that the choice to give is theirs.

Enter rewards. Should we reward supporters for making a gift, or not? As is usually the case, the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no; and it lies in how rewards affect people’s feelings of volition and competence and, as a consequence, their autonomous (the good) motivation.

Things to consider:

• Rewards can be controlling as they could lead people to do something they don’t particularly enjoy e.g. menial work for high salary.
• In such cases, when rewards are removed, people stop that behaviour. Would they keep doing that menial job for free?
• Some activities are intrinsically motivated; we don’t need to be externally rewarded, we love doing them for their own sake e.g. your favourite hobby, or leisure activity – which also reinforces who you are (e.g. a runner, a fly fisherman, a volunteer) and that on its own is a major reward.
• If the task is inherently interesting (e.g. reading a good book), or otherwise done autonomously, introducing rewards can reduce subsequent willingness to do the task.

That last point is crucial. Once you start receiving rewards for an activity you love, would you freely choose to do it when those rewards are removed? We’ve all heard stories of people turning their hobby into a career and then starting to lose interest in the activity they previously loved.

And there’s evidence to support this. Below is a simplified visual from a comprehensive review of studies examining the effect rewards have on free-choice behaviour. The researchers observed whether people freely returned to, or engaged in an activity they loved, after being rewarded for it.

Before we draw conclusions, let’s bring this closer to home. We can easily “translate” the rewards in the graph into current fundraising practices:

Verbal rewards= thank you, or impact communications

Tangible rewards = gifts charities give to supporters and these can be either

  – Unexpected = given after someone made a donation without warning

  – Expected = the infamous back-end premiums which usually are

• • Donation contingent= given if the supporter makes a donation and
  • Donation amount contingent= given if donation is over a certain amount

With this in mind, here’s how volitional giving, giving that is the result of autonomous motivation, could be affected by rewards.

Thank you, or impact communications could lead to repeat giving. No surprise here. Best practice tells us about the importance of thanking supporters and showing them the difference they make (of course how you do that is crucially important, and impossible to do effectively without zero party data, but that’s a subject we’ve covered many times before).

Unexpected, thank you, gifts don’t seem to affect repeat giving. Intuitively, we’d expect a positive relationship. Something worth testing perhaps?

Premiums could reduce repeat giving. This is confirmed by academic studies on incentives and prosocial behaviour. Empirically, this is felt when we remove premiums and giving stops.

To conclude: yes, offering rewards could increase giving in the short-term, but it’s giving that is based on controlled motivation. If you’re interested in increasing retention, or repeat giving, then you should carefully consider the types of rewards you use.

If a supporter truly believes in your cause, don’t “kill” her autonomous motivation by introducing gifts and premiums. Instead, nurture it with gratitude, appreciation and demonstration of impact.

Kiki