How Individual Impact Feedback drives Social Media Sharing and Donor Retention

Description

Social media has become an important channel through which charitable organizations seek to extend their reach and influence. However, little is known about how donors can be encouraged to share charity-related content with their social networks, or whether sharing has downstream effects on future donation behavior. We address these questions in a large-scale randomized field experiment among 20,671 blood donors conducted in collaboration with the Red Cross. Over a six-month period, we invited first-time and existing blood donors to share a thank-you message following their donation. The message varied along two dimensions: whether it provided individual impact feedback (i.e., information on the day and hospital in which the donated blood was used) and whether it was personalized (i.e., included the donor’s first name). While we find that first-time donors are generally less willing to share compared to existing donors, individual impact feedback (but not personalization) alleviates this effect by increasing willingness to share among first-time donors (but not existing donors). Interestingly, an exploration of the shared content reveals that both factors worked in attracting prospective donors. Moreover, we tracked treated donors’ subsequent blood donations for one year following the intervention. While we identify no direct effects of the two experimental factors, we find that sharing increases donor retention, particularly among first-time donors. Together, these results provide field evidence on how message design influences social sharing and how sharing behavior relates to donor retention, offering actionable insights for organizations seeking to leverage social media in prosocial contexts.

Period	23 Jan 2026
Held at	Emlyon Business School, France
Degree of Recognition	International