How responsive are charitable donors to requests to give?∗

People tend to contribute more to a charity when they are asked to. Although this so-called ‘power of asking’ is well-known among fundraisers, the existing literature does not pay much attention to the role of donation requests in charitable giving. This paper uses a unique data set, which was designed to measure giving behavior in the United States, to estimate the causal effects of charitable solicitations on both the propensity to give and the amount of charitable contributions. In order to address the endogeneity of the donation requests due to non-random solicitation of charitable donors, I link this data set to IRS data on charitable organizations and the 2000 Census and propose identifying instruments. After controlling for the endogeneity, I find that donation requests increase the propensity to give by about twenty percentage points for those who are asked to give. This effect is robust under different specifications and with different sets of instruments, and is much larger than the estimates from univariate models, which assume that charitable solicitations are exogenous. I argue that this result may be associated with donor fatigue. Furthermore, I document that some identifiable characteristics of individuals are associated with a higher probability of being solicited. In particular, income, age, education, and race play significant roles in explaining the selection of potential charitable donors.