"I Owe You One" - Reciprocity Decay and Fundraising

Everyone knows the feeling.

DENNIS HOFFMAN, CEO ENGAGE USA — DENNIS HOFFMAN, CEO
ENGAGE USA

You’ve just finished lunch with a friend and the waiter arrives to drop off the check. Before you can retrieve your wallet, your friend hands the waiter his credit card and says he’ll cover both your meals.

A twinge of anxiety enters your mind. You know you “owe him one” even though he hasn’t asked for anything in return for footing the bill.

This is called a sense of reciprocity.

Psychology Today defines reciprocity psychology as the human compulsion “to repay or reciprocate when given a gift whether it has come in the form of a material object, a kind deed, or an act of generosity.”

According to Coglode.com, human-beings are “hard-wired to both give and give back, but we're also crucially obliged to accept. In accepting a gift, whether we wanted it or not, we're then motivated to remove the uncomfortable feeling of indebtedness that comes saddled with it.”

Interestingly, the feeling of owing a friend for buying lunch might not last as long as one might assume.

A new study has found that “reciprocity has a very narrow window and will quickly disappear.” This is known as reciprocity decay - and it affects giving to nonprofit organizations.

The study, conducted by researchers at The Wharton School, looked at whether patients who visited a hospital later donated to the hospital when asked.

Patients were put into groups based on the date of their hospital visit. The patients who visited the hospital within the same two calendar months were “chunked” together. For example, there was a September-October group.

“Regardless of their personal visit date,” patients in each group were mailed donation requests at the same time. This means within each two-month period, there was a wide range of dates when individuals actually visited the hospital.

This has major implications for nonprofit organizations in terms of reciprocity decay. The study found that the “likelihood to donate significantly reduced as the time between their first visit and point of being asked for money increased.”

A patient who visited the hospital in early September and another who visited the hospital in late October would be in the same group. They visited the hospital almost two months apart. The first patient would receive a donation request far longer after his visit than the second.

The study suggests the first patient would be much less likely to donate – “waiting 30 days… after a patient's last visit reduced donations by about 50%!” This is reciprocity decay in action.

Researchers believe “a lot of it has to do with memory.” As a hospital visit or a friend picking up the check fades from a person’s memory, so too does a person’s willingness to give back.

This highlights the need for nonprofits and charities to maximize their mailing selects by reaching out to donors in a timely manner.

In our hospital example, the two-month mailing strategy wasted much of the donation potential of people in the early part of that time period.

Coglode.com found the key takeaway from this study was to avoid waiting too long to ask prospective donors to give money.

If your organization has held an event, launched a campaign, or conducted new research – strike while the iron is hot! Ask your donors for support while you’re on their mind. Don’t let them forget the lunch you bought them.

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