Displaying the list of fundraiser donors sorted by the donation date would help with the "wait and see" problem.
Parents:
- Why waiting to donate harms charities
A blog post explaining the potential reasons why someone would choose to wait to donate and how that leads to suboptimal outcomes for the charity.
This seems like it would be interesting to do an experiment with, maybe with people betting on what would happen? We’d of course have to spec out the terms of the bet…
I think if one was to attempt it, it would be important to get the messaging right. If you just did it without saying anything, my guess is that it would have little effect. But making it widely know that you are doing this and saying something along the lines of “show your pride in and support for the organization by donating early,” while also explaining the reasoning and the problem, I think should work better.
I’d agree more strongly if it had a couple of fixes for obvious problems, so I proposed some.
Problem: Some people don’t want to have it be public that they donated, or how much.
Proposed solution: Let people choose pseudonyms if they like; offer default pseudonyms (like Google Docs does, giving random animals for anonymous contributors) in order to avoid creating trivial inconveniences.
Problem: Scale of donations matters as well as timing; we don’t want to just incentivize a bunch of $1 donations on the first day.
Proposed solution from Alexei: make names larger, bolder, or more visible if they donated more.
Problem with proposed solution: $1 FIRST POST person still gets to be at the top, biggest donors don’t get to be near the top
New proposed solution: Donation tiers, starting with the largest occupied tier and sorting within tiers by who was earliest to enter that tier (aggregating multiple donations from the same person)
Claimed side benefit: Schelling donation amounts can encourage people to give more than they otherwise would- they’re more likely to stretch upward to the next tier than to drop their donation to the minimum for the current tier.
Evidence for this: charities and crowdfunding sites love doing donation tiers.