Jackpot for Good: Can Lottery Matches Increase Charitable Giving?

This study investigates the effectiveness of donation matching gift schemes using lotteries for increasing charitable giving relative to deterministic matches of equivalent or higher expected value and a no-match control. We recruit 1,402 online participants and randomly assign them to one of seven conditions: No Match (Control), and two sets of matching schemes of varying equivalent expected values: EV=1 (1:1 Deterministic Match, 1:10% of 10 tokens, and 1:1% of 100) and EV=0.5 (2:1 Deterministic Match, 1:1% of 50 tokens and 1:0.5% of 100), where one token is $0.50. Participants complete three 10-token allocation decisions for hunger-related charities with one allocation randomly selected for realization. The 1:1 Match significantly increases giving by 15.7% compared to No Match. We find that matching schemes with a small probability of a very large amount (1% and 0.5% of 100) elicit significantly higher rates of giving compared to No Match (Mann-Whitney p=0.019 and p=0.096 respectively) and do not statistically differ from the 1:1 Match (Mann-Whitney p=0.976 and p=0.622 respectively). Our results suggest nonprofits can use matching gift donations more efficiently through lottery matching donation schemes while increasing downstream donations.