Researchers cast doubt on impact of match funding on donations

The results of experiments using match giving to encourage donations to crowd funding campaigns are “not promising”, researchers from University College London have warned. Following two experiments that tested different methods of match giving the researchers said “[we] cannot be confident that we have elicited any additional donations”.

The study challenges existing reports that have found match giving to be effective. While the researchers say these findings do not “justify abandoning the hope that these interventions might ultimately succeed,” they do advise charities to consider how else match funding could be spent.

With funding from the Cabinet Office Trials Fund, the researchers ran two experiments, one in which a group of fundraisers asked friends to sponsor them for taking part in a sporting event and another in which a charity asked for donations to support an employee, also taking part in a sporting event. Several methods of match giving were then trialled, including a standard pound for pound match, competitive matching, in which fundraisers were split into two groups and match funding awarded to the group that raised the most, and increasing matching, in which larger donations unlocked a greater amount of match funding. None of these approaches had a discernible impact on donations.

The use of match funding to incentivise giving has a long history in the arts sector, with schemes aimed at incentivising business sponsors being supported by both Conservative and Labour Governments since the mid-1980s. Most recently, Arts Council England (ACE) has used part of its government-funded Catalyst scheme – for which £100m was budgeted in 2012-15 – to help organisations incentivise individual giving and endowments with match funding. The latest review of the programme found it was too soon to judge its financial success, but concerns have been raised that organisations funded through the Endowments arm of the programme struggled to reach their targets and ACE doesn’t plan to repeat the scheme.