People become more generous if they do not feel too pressurised to help charities, suggests new research which contends that longer deadlines lead to more donations.
The new research, published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, may help charities around the world generate more funds for their work.
"We know from other studies that people don't like pressure when donating money, so we interpret the results to mean that if you pressure people with a short deadline, it creates a sort of give-and-take mindset in the recipient: 'Alright, I'll agree to donate quickly, but you're not getting as much'," said one of the researchers Mette Trier Damgaard from Denmark's Aarhus University School of Business and Social Sciences.
To evaluate how deadlines affect charity, the researchers sent emails and text messages to over 50,000 people in Denmark who had donated money to DanChurchAid -- a Danish humanitarian NGO aimed at supporting the world's poorest people -- at least once within the past six years.
For the approximately 20,300 email recipients, the deadline was three days, ten days or until the first day of the following month respectively.
For the approximately 33,000 text message recipients, the deadline was shorter - midnight on the following day, three days or until the first day of the following month respectively.
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The results showed that the donations increased when the deadline was longer.
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