Planned giving, including workplace giving through payroll is important in providing a regular source of income for charities and not-for-profit organisations. More Australian employers are offering workplace giving to their employees, but participation is low.
Workplace giving makes up only about 1 per cent of overall donations to charity. Participation rates remain low: 4.7% nationally and 1.8% in the APS.
We used behavioural science to test ways to increase workplace giving. We used three randomised controlled trials to test the impact of messaging, gifts, messengers and time delays within two Australian Government departments and one corporate partner.
Our main findings:
- In our first trial, behaviourally designed emails increased giving from 2% to 3.3%.
- The inclusion of gifts did not have any additional impact on giving.
- In our second trial, a simple sign-up process and message from a senior manager increased participation to 3.8%.
- In our third trial, asking people to ‘give later’ did not make a significant difference.
A simple, tailored email sent by all APS agencies, could lead to:
- more than 1,000 new sign-ups
- around $500,000 extra in donations in the first year.
The corporate setting might have different operating contexts to the APS and may benefit from a different medium to emails. It is difficult to draw conclusions about time-delayed giving.
