Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.Pledging campaigns, where individuals make a public commitment to act in a civic way, have been widely adopted by charities and policy-makers to help encourage charitable giving, but have been rarely tested as against a simple request. It is hard to infer from observational data whether pledging makes a difference. To overcome this problem, a randomised controlled trial on the effects of pledging was undertaken in Manchester, in partnership with the Community HEART charity. A total of 11,812 households in two electoral wards were sent information about an upcoming charity campaign to develop school libraries in South Africa: they were told that in a few weeks they would be asked to donate a children’s book. Households were randomly assigned to receive differently worded requests to test whether people are more likely to pledge and later donate if they are told their involvement will be made public. Further information on the project may be found on the ESRC's Rediscovering the Civic and Achieving Better Outcomes in Public Policy award page. This is an ESRC Ventures research programme, co-funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government and the North West Improvement and Efficiency Network. This particular project aimed to find out the most effective means to encourage active citizenship, using innovative experimental methods including randomised controlled trials and design experiments as well as survey re-analysis to understand the civic-outcome link. A previous study conducted under the same project is held at the UK Data Archive under SN 6874, How to Get Those Recycling Boxes Out: a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Door-to-Door Recycling Service, 2008. Main Topics:Variables in the data file include household identifier, pledge made and book donated, geographic units such as ward and Super Output Area, and population characteristics.