A very interesting article in the NY Times mentions the findings of real world tests about charitable donations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/magazine/09Psychology-t.html?ex=1362718800&en=4b7120438b7207af&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=allSome key parts that might benefit Kiva:
When tax rates were higher — and deductions were thus more valuable — people gave more. It seemed to follow that they would be equally rational about a match. When Karlan and List got their results, however, they realized that the conventional wisdom about matches was only partly right. The existence of a matching gift did very much matter. In their experiment, 2.2 percent of people who received the match offer made a donation, compared with only 1.8 percent of the control group. That may not seem like a big difference, but it is — more than a 20 percent gap between the two response rates, which is certainly large enough to justify making the effort to solicit a hefty matching gift.
But the size of the match in the experiment didn’t have any effect on giving. Donors who received the offer of a one-to-one match gave just as often, and just as much, as those responding to the three-to-one offer. That was surprising, because a larger match is effectively a deeper discount on a person’s gift. Yet in this case, the deeper discount didn’t make an impact.
I have never seen donation matching for Kiva and this appears to be quite effective. Maybe if an organization chooses to make a donation to Kiva, it could be suggested to offer it as matching donations up to a limit? Either matching direct donations to Kiva or matching loans - though the lender wouldn't get the match of course.
What got List noticed by Chicago, however, was an experiment with sports cards. Using data from card shows, he showed that traders became more rational — less emotionally tied to the cards they owned — as they accumulated more experience.
Could in this case cards be replaced with loans? The first few loans are entirely emotionally, whereas rational motivations (for example diversification of countries) take precedent later on. If so, it might apply that to keep lenders returning after the initial time period, they'd want to see more evidence that microlending indeed works?
Maybe there could be a featured article once a month about a former Kiva entrepreneur who has greatly expanded his business. There used to be an article about a baker who now owns a second bakery and hired employees - things like this. Along with that, a link at the top could lead to a list of academic papers in support of microlending.
So she and her co-author, Jen Shang, conducted an experiment in which listeners who called to make a pledge were casually told that another caller had made a gift. But the amount of the gift varied — in some cases, $75 (which was the median gift size for that station), in others, $300. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the callers who heard about the $75 gift didn’t seem to be affected by it. They gave the same amount, on average, as callers usually gave. But the people who heard about the $300 gift gave more — about 12 percent more on average — having apparently been inspired, or shamed, into being more generous.
Croson and Shang then tried a variation on the experiment at a different station, using $600 and $1,000 gifts instead. And here came the rub: the callers who heard about a $1,000 gift actually gave less than those who were told about a $600 gift. To most callers, a $1,000 donation sounded too large to be relevant.
I wonder if lenders might respond more charitable if the request for donations after loans would feature a raw dollar amount instead of a percentage. For example "The average donations from lenders is: $x" - would seem easy enough to try and track. Although maybe using the average wouldn't be very helpful and instead using "We suggest a donation of $x", whereas x is higher than the average, but not too high.
Offering a lottery, on the other hand, worked in both the short term and the long term. People gave more money when they were told their donation made them eligible for a prize, and they gave more the next time they were asked too.
A Kiva calendar or gift certificates for new loans as a prize. Tickets for the entry could either be given for donations or for loans, (or both) depending on where the incentive should be.
