Does online salience predict charitable giving? Evidence from SMS text donations

Carlo Perroni; Kimberley Scharf; Oleksandr Talavera; Linh Vi

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2022.02.015

Does online salience predict charitable giving? Evidence from SMS text donations

Carlo Perroni, Kimberley Scharf^*, Oleksandr Talavera, Linh Vi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

We explore the link between online salience and charitable donations. Using a unique dataset on phone text donations that includes detailed information on the timing of cash gifts to charities, we link donations to time variation in online searches for words that appear in those charities’ mission statements. The results suggest that an increase in the online salience of the activities pursued by different charities affects the number and volume of donations made to those charities and to charities that pursue different goals. We uncover evidence of positive “own-salience” effects and negative “cross-salience” effects on donations.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	134-149
Number of pages	16
Journal	Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Volume	197
Early online date	18 Mar 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.02.015
Publication status	Published - May 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful to the National Funding Scheme, particularly William Makower and David Wright, for making SMS donations data available to us (in anonymized form); and to Minjung Kim, Ayse Yemiscigil, other participants to the 2020 SPI conference, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All views and opinions expressed in this paper are our own, and do not reflect the views and opinions of the National Funding Scheme.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

Charitable donations
News shocks
Online search

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Economics and Econometrics
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Access to Document

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PerroniC2022onlineAccepted author manuscript, 244 KBLicence: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)

Cite this

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title = "Does online salience predict charitable giving? Evidence from SMS text donations",

abstract = "We explore the link between online salience and charitable donations. Using a unique dataset on phone text donations that includes detailed information on the timing of cash gifts to charities, we link donations to time variation in online searches for words that appear in those charities{\textquoteright} mission statements. The results suggest that an increase in the online salience of the activities pursued by different charities affects the number and volume of donations made to those charities and to charities that pursue different goals. We uncover evidence of positive “own-salience” effects and negative “cross-salience” effects on donations.",

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AU - Scharf, Kimberley

AU - Talavera, Oleksandr

AU - Vi, Linh

N1 - Funding Information: We are grateful to the National Funding Scheme, particularly William Makower and David Wright, for making SMS donations data available to us (in anonymized form); and to Minjung Kim, Ayse Yemiscigil, other participants to the 2020 SPI conference, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All views and opinions expressed in this paper are our own, and do not reflect the views and opinions of the National Funding Scheme. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

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AB - We explore the link between online salience and charitable donations. Using a unique dataset on phone text donations that includes detailed information on the timing of cash gifts to charities, we link donations to time variation in online searches for words that appear in those charities’ mission statements. The results suggest that an increase in the online salience of the activities pursued by different charities affects the number and volume of donations made to those charities and to charities that pursue different goals. We uncover evidence of positive “own-salience” effects and negative “cross-salience” effects on donations.

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Does online salience predict charitable giving? Evidence from SMS text donations

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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