How Low Can You Go? An Investigation into Matching Gifts in Fundraising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a rich existing economic literature that considers the impact of matching offers on the behavior of donors to nonprofit organizations, both in the laboratory and in the field. We evaluate the impact of matching gift offers included in a nonpartisan nonprofit organization’s holiday mail fundraising drive. We add to the existing literature in two ways. First, our use of a nonpartisan nonprofit is uncommon. Second, prior literature establishes that more generous matches (beyond $1:$1) generally do not increase donations in a cost-effective way. However, few studies consider less generous offers. We evaluate the impact of a $1:$10 matching offer. Our results suggest that the nonprofit organization’s donors are not generally susceptible to matching offers, but that the $1:$1 match led to a higher response rate and larger gift than the $1:$10 match for legacy donors. We also find that donors more closely tied to the organization through prior giving are more likely to give in response to an ask without matching offers than donors without past giving. Our results suggest that low matching offers are not worth pursuing for many nonprofit organizations, and that the response to offers differs across regular donors to the organization compared to other donor types.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".