A reliable way to enrage almost anyone who works in charity fundraising, I’ve found, is to mention the word “overheads”. Once the veins in their temples have stopped bulging, and their breathing is back to normal, they might tell you why. There’s a widespread belief that it’s best to give to charities that keep their overheads low: after all, you want your donation to help actual starving children or Syrian refugees, not heat the charity’s offices, or pay for the HR department.
Yet many charities say that’s terrible reasoning: what matters is how many starving children you save, and big results sometimes entail big overheads. Experts have been fretting for years about “overhead aversion”, as it’s known – so it was surprising when a recent study, in the journal Science, suggested a comically simple solution. Don’t do what charities often do, persuading people to give by promising that some major donor will match their contribution pound-for-pound. Instead, tell them the major donor is already covering the overheads – so their money can go directly to the real work. That tiny tweak boosted donations by a startling 75%.
Logically speaking, that’s absurd. Money is fungible: once your £1 donation has been added to a charity’s bank balance, it’s meaningless to promise that that specific pound will go to, say, typhoid vaccines. Yet we take absurd attitudes to money all the time. A famous example concerns a movie ticket: if you’re planning to spend £10 to see the new Godzilla movie, then lose a £10 note in the street, you’re more likely to stick to your plans than if you’d already bought and then lost the ticket. But the overheads study also hints at the selfishness of charity: that what we care about isn’t how much gets spent on what, but that we get to feel the warm glow of knowing our money went direct to those in need.
That somewhat unedifying conclusion is reinforced by a second recent study by the University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic and colleagues. We’ve long known about the “drop in the bucket effect”: people are far less keen to give to charity, it turns out, when they’re reminded that their donation is a tiny part of what’s needed. But Slovic et al probed further. They showed some participants a photo of a child whose life their donation might save; others saw two children, and were told their donation could save one of them. The sight of one extra child, reminding them of the limits of their gift, sharply reduced what people were willing to donate. The real joy of giving, it seems, is the selfish feeling that you alone solved an entire problem.
Take these findings together, and it starts to look like charity is more often motivated by chasing that inner glow, not seeking the best results. When it comes to your own charitable giving, it’s tempting to consider adopting a perverse approach: look out for causes that tug at your heart, and those where you feel your gift could make a huge difference – and then donate your money elsewhere instead.
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oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
