UMass Amherst Researcher Finds ‘Preheating’ Plays a Key Role in Charitable Giving

The link between giving and happiness is well documented and now new research co-authored by a University of Massachusetts Amherst resource economist takes that connection a step further. An analysis of real-world charitable contributions shows that positive moods produce greater generosity—key information that has the potential to enhance the fundraising efforts of philanthropic causes and inform how fundraisers are engineered.

Nathan Chan, associate professor of resource economics at UMass Amherst, and Casey Wichman, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Economics, analyzed millions of tweets by thousands of people who donated to the same public good over a six-month period. They discovered strong evidence of a “preheating” effect, where positive sentiment increased up to an hour before giving.

“We find a lot of evidence that people are experiencing positive sentiments before the time of giving. The core takeaway is that people’s affective state is important to their giving decisions,” Chan says. “There’s a large amount of literature investigating whether being charitable makes people happier, or whether being happier makes people more charitable. Our paper offers new evidence for the latter.”

The research is believed to be the first of its kind to document preheating effects immediately before giving in a natural environment. The findings are based on more than 20,000 Twitter users who donated to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and then tweeted the standardized message written by the organization: “I just donated to Wikipedia. Support free knowledge! #iloveWikipedia.”

To determine the mood of donors, Chan and Wichman used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the sentiment of all the donors’ publicly available tweets prior to their contributions and for at least one month following the #iloveWikipedia tweets. In all, more than three million tweets were analyzed. The technique makes it possible to characterize sentiment and infer motivations at scale.

The results represent new knowledge that can inform charitable organizations as they seek to maximize their fundraising efforts.

“The findings are interesting simply because I think many of us believe one reason we give to charity is because of how it makes us feel,” Wichman says. “But there’s a practical side of this, as well, and that has to do with how nonprofit fundraisers might want to think about shifting tactics to improve the moods of would-be donors before soliciting donations.”

“If you can find moments when people are happy, that might be a good time to be targeting them for charitable contributions,” Chan adds.

The research, “Preheating Prosocial Behavior,” appears in The Economic Journal.