Giving blood. It saves lives, it’s free, and the entire process takes only about an hour. Yet less than 10 percent of eligible donors living in the industrialized world actually give blood, with even lower percentages in developing nations. For decades, the American Red Cross and other organizations have provided material incentives such as hats, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and concert tickets to entice potential donors. But does that strategy work, and is it cost-effective?
Enter Mario Macis, assistant professor at the Carey Business School. From 2002 to 2006, Macis conducted research on blood donor behavior in a midsized Italian town whose inhabitants’ age, income, education, and other characteristics closely mirrored Italy’s overall urban population. In that study, he discovered that social recognition (in the form of certificates and other symbolic awards for reaching donation milestones) worked together with intrinsic motivation (the desire to “do good”) to encourage donors to continue—and increase—their giving.
What, Macis wondered, would the results look like for a U.S. community? Are Americans likewise intrinsically motivated, or are they more likely to respond to material incentives?
To answer these questions, Macis and his colleagues studied data from approximately 14,000 blood drives—including nearly 500,000 donors—conducted by the American Red Cross in northern Ohio between 2006 and 2008. Of the drives examined in the study, 37 percent offered at least one incentive. Macis’ research, the results of which were accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, found that U.S. donors were driven by the type and value of the incentives offered, and not by any perceived social recognition—a result very different from that of the Italian study. The U.S. study also found that, given the choice, some donors will change plans and choose a drive offering material incentives over one that does not. This causes a corresponding reduced turnout at neighboring drives known as the “displacement effect.” The downside: a potential to overestimate the positive effect of incentives to increase overall participation rates, and the threat of drives unintentionally stealing donors from one another.
So, are all those free hats, coffee mugs, and T-shirts really worth it? Overall, Macis’ research concluded that the presence of material incentives increased turnout an average of 15 to 20 percent (or five to seven additional donors based on an average 36 donors per drive). “Even if 45 percent of this increase can be attributed to the displacement effect of donors shifting locations to take advantage of drives offering incentives,” he says, “the resultant data still indicates that incentives as offered by the Red Cross are a cost-effective way to increase donations.”
