Is it what you say or how you say it? The impact of aid effectiveness information and its framing on donation behavior

In an online experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we analyze the effect of framing information about aid effectiveness on donation behavior. We find that combing a loss frame with an identified victim narrative to convey information about a development project’s impact raises larger donations than a gain-framed narrative or a factual text. Also, donation calls that only state the development problem the project is addressing result in larger donations than donation calls providing additional information on the project’s impact. Analyzing the mechanisms behind these results, the data shows that, regardless of the framing, providing information about a project’s impact increases individuals’ knowledge and perception of effectiveness. But, while higher perceived effectiveness results in larger donations, increased knowledge lowers them - resulting in a zero net effect of additional information on donations. It seems that only appealing to individuals’ emotions through an identified victim narrative significantly increases donations.