December 1, 2007
Dear Economist: Would it be more beneficial to hold more creditable charity events?
Dear Economist,
I am often asked to sponsor various “a-thons” for charitable purposes. The range of events is endless, from bowl-a-thons to skip-a-thons, and of no inherent value to anyone. Would it not be far more beneficial if the events were more creditable in nature? For example, arranging a rubbish-a-thon whereby individuals are sponsored by the hour for clearing a riverbank of rubbish. Surely the end result would be increased sponsorship being raised; a cleaner environment; and an increased sense of achievement.
Jenny
Dear Jenny,
The risk is that your proposal would choke off the supply of willing volunteers. You seem sanguine: volunteers would, you surmise, enjoy a sense of achievement. I am not so sure. Charity is a wonderful thing, but let us not blind ourselves to the fact that a lot of volunteering is about showing off.
The economists Jeffrey Carpenter and Caitlin Knowles Myers studied the behaviour of volunteer firefighters who were offered modest financial incentives. Many were motivated by these incentives, but some were not.
Curiously, the ones who were not motivated by money were also the ones who had bought special vanity plates indicating that they were community volunteers. It seems that these volunteers were motivated by a desire to look good, and did not want the idea of a cash incentive to sully their reputation.
I speculate that your approach might make “a-thons” less showy and therefore less useful for signalling altruism. If your idea is really so good, why has it not already caught on?
Questions to economist@ft.com
As a kid we use to do Tree-A-thons where we would get donations for the number of Trees we planted.
So we both got donations for non-profits and planted trees to help the environment.
But i still agree with the economist on why these things are not more wide spread.
Posted by: cameron | December 1st, 2007 at 9:09 am | Report this commentI discussed the economics of charity races while guestblogging at EconLog about a year ago. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/07/economics_and_c_1.html
Upshot: It’s not the altruism-signalling that’s key. You could similarly have a parade of people who’ve all completed 100 hours volunteer work for the charity. Rather, it’s the tied benefits of the charity race that make it attractive to participants. They get an enforced exercise regimen — who wants to have to give all the money back to their friends ’cause they weren’t able to finish the race ’cause they didn’t train enough?
Any individual wanting to help the charity would almost certainly do better to spend the time working overtime (or taking a part time job), donating the money to the cause, and asking their friends to match a portion of their contributions. But race organisers would not do better by switching to the “work plus parade” format as doing so would reduce participation by more than would be gained by transforming wasteful training into productive work.
I’ve also noticed that participants in these runs really do not like it when you suggest to them that the people they’re trying to help would be better off if they’d take a part time job rather than do the run.
Posted by: Eric Crampton | December 1st, 2007 at 9:01 pm | Report this comment“If your idea is really so good, why has it not already caught on?”
isn’t this an argument against virtually any kind of social change or non-technical innovation?
ie:
If [libertarianism] is really so good, why has it not already caught on?
Posted by: Dave | December 3rd, 2007 at 2:49 pm | Report this comment