The Closing-the-Gap Effect: Joint Evaluation Leads Donors to Help Charities Farther from Their Goal

Abstract

Charitable donations can be influenced by the level of progress a cause has made toward its fundraising goal. The current work demonstrates how jointly considering more than one charitable cause along with their goal progress information shifts consumers’ donation decisions. When charitable causes are evaluated jointly (vs. separately), the comparison makes relative need for help more salient and easier to evaluate, leading to greater giving to the cause farther from its goal. A multimethod investigation, involving six preregistered experimental studies, seven supplemental studies, and a large secondary dataset with over 10,000 projects from a micro-crowdfunding platform, provides evidence for this phenomenon and demonstrates that it is robust to variations in the type of cause, the number of projects, and the donor being able to personally complete the goal. Conversely, the effect is eliminated or reversed when charities are evaluated separately (as relative need for help is less salient), when the gap between charities is smaller (as perceptions of relative need for help are diminished), or when for-profit businesses are evaluated (as the context does not heighten sensitivity to need). This work contributes to research on goal progress and evaluation mode and has implications for charitable giving in comparative contexts like crowdfunding.