A Few More Words for a Few More Cents: The Roles of Beneficiary and Message Frames during a Door-to-Door Donation Collection

Door-to-door collections provide an essential source of income for charitable organizations. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of a door-to-door donation collection technique has been waning in recent years. Previous studies have shown that framing can improve the effectiveness of charitable appeals. Hence, this research aims at gaining insights into the possible effects of framing charitable appeals on donation behavior in a door-to-door collection context. A field experiment, employing a door-to-door collection for a Dutch charitable organization, using a 2 × 3 between-subjects design, was conducted with 528 households in a Dutch municipality. Results show that of the two framing types (beneficiary frame and message frame) used for the door-to-door collection technique, only message frame influences the amount donated to the charitable organization, as the use of a loss frame appeal resulted in a higher amount of money donated than the use of a gain frame appeal. Moreover, when compared to the current practice of just requesting for a small donation without any message element (the control condition), including message elements to the door-to-door collection script did not improve people’s donation behavior and increase the amount donated. These findings have important implications for how door-to-door collections must be performed.