Fund-Raising on the Web: The Effect of an Electronic Foot-in-the-Door on Donation

In an attempt to test the foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique in a computer-mediated communication context, 1,008 men and women taken at random in various e-mails lists were solicited to visit a web site for the profit of a humanitarian organization. In the FITD condition, subjects were first solicited to sign a petition form and, after that, they were solicited for a donation. In the control condition, the donation solicitation was formulated directly. In all cases, the formulation of the requests was manipulated by the order of the successive HTML pages of the site. Results show that the FITD procedure increases compliance to the final request.