How Pledging Can Make a Difference to Charitable Giving: a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Book Donation Campaign, 2010

Pledging campaigns, where individuals make a public commitment to act in a civic way, have been widely adopted by charities and policy-makers to help encourage charitable giving, but have been rarely tested as against a simple request. It is hard to infer from observational data whether pledging makes a difference. To overcome this problem, a randomised controlled trial on the effects of pledging was undertaken in Manchester, in partnership with the Community HEART charity. A total of 11,812 households in two electoral wards were sent information about an upcoming charity campaign to develop school libraries in South Africa: they were told that in a few weeks they would be asked to donate a children’s book. Households were randomly assigned to receive differently worded requests to test whether people are more likely to pledge and later donate if they are told their involvement will be made public. <br> <br> Further information on the project may be found on the ESRC's <a href="http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-177-25-0002/read" title="Rediscovering the Civic and Achieving Better Outcomes in Public Policy">Rediscovering the Civic and Achieving Better Outcomes in Public Policy</a> award page. This is an ESRC Ventures research programme, co-funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government and the North West Improvement and Efficiency Network. This particular project aimed to find out the most effective means to encourage active citizenship, using innovative experimental methods including randomised controlled trials and design experiments as well as survey re-analysis to understand the civic-outcome link. <br> <br> A previous study conducted under the same project is held at the UK Data Archive under SN 6874, <i>How to Get Those Recycling Boxes Out: a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Door-to-Door Recycling Service, 2008</i>.<br> <br>

个体公开作出公民行为承诺的公开承诺活动，已被慈善机构与政策制定者广泛用于推动慈善捐赠，但目前鲜有研究将其与简单捐赠请求开展对照测试。仅通过观测数据难以推断此类公开承诺活动是否能产生实际效果。为解决这一难题，研究团队联合社区之心（Community HEART）慈善机构在曼彻斯特开展了一项针对公开承诺活动效果的随机对照试验（Randomised Controlled Trial, RCT）。该试验覆盖两个选区的11812户家庭，研究人员向这些家庭发送了一则关于南非学校图书馆建设慈善活动的预告信息，并告知他们数周后将收到捐赠儿童图书的请求。研究人员将这些家庭随机分组，为不同组发送措辞不同的捐赠请求，以此验证：当告知参与者其参与行为将被公开时，人们是否更愿意作出承诺并后续完成捐赠。

本项目的更多详细信息可在经济与社会研究理事会（Economic and Social Research Council, ESRC）的「重拾公民价值与优化公共政策成效（Rediscovering the Civic and Achieving Better Outcomes in Public Policy）」资助项目页面查询。本项目隶属于ESRC创新研究计划（ESRC Ventures），由社区与地方政府部以及西北改善与效率网络联合资助。本项具体研究旨在探寻鼓励积极公民参与的最优路径，采用了包括随机对照试验、设计实验以及问卷再分析在内的创新实验方法，以厘清公民行为与政策成效之间的关联机制。

本项目此前开展的一项研究已收录于英国数据档案库（UK Data Archive），编号为SN 6874，研究标题为《如何推动回收箱投放：2008年上门回收服务随机对照试验》（How to Get Those Recycling Boxes Out: a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Door-to-Door Recycling Service, 2008）。