Yesterday, Freakonomics Radio made an appearance in the Pearls Before Swine comic strip, by Stephan Pastis. The episode he refers to is “How to Raise Money Without Killing a Kitten.”
(HT: Lots of people — thanks!)
Our recent podcast “How to Raise Money Without Killing a Kitten” represented the launch of a fund-raising campaign for Freakonomics Radio. Let me say a few things about the campaign:
1. Wow! Listeners have so far responded way, way, way better than Levitt predicted they would in the podcast — so: 1a) Thanks!; and 1b) Nice job in proving a pretty smart guy very wrong.
2. Some of your comments and e-mails noted that WNYC’s fund-raising site doesn’t allow for contributions via PayPal, text, Flattr, Bitcoin, etc. That is true. Hopefully some of these avenues will be added over time. Some of you also noted that the podcast already has advertising, so why are we also asking for contributions from listeners? Good question. Short answer: WNYC is the funding producer of our podcast, and as such is responsible for paying all our producer and engineer salaries, studio time, field-recording costs, music-licensing costs, bandwidth, and a million other things, like the transcription of interviews (for every minute of talking that ends up in the podcast, we’ve probably got about five minutes of interview tape). We are grateful for the advertisers on our podcast, but that revenue is not nearly enough to produce the podcast. That’s why we came to you, our listeners, for additional support.
Writing at the Monkey Cage, political scientist Cristian Vaccari describes his research about how political candidates, who often rely heavily on email lists, actually respond to emails:
As part of a broader study of the online presence of parties, party leaders, and Presidential candidates in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S., I tested whether and how rapidly their staffs responded to two types of emails (sent from separate fictitious accounts in the official language of each country): one asking for their positions on taxes (a cross-cutting issue that should not strongly differentiate between different types of parties), the other pledging to be willing to volunteer for them and asking for directions on how to do so. Emails were sent in the two weeks prior to national elections between 2007 and 2010 to a total of 142 parties and candidates. The results speak volumes to the lack of responsiveness among political actors: excluding automated responses, only one in five emails received a reply within one business day.
We recently heard from John List, the economics-of-charity guru, about the use of lotteries in fund-raising.
Here now is a new List paper, co-authored with Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, called “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving.”
Michael Knetter may just go down in history as one of the greatest fundraisers of all time. Knetter is the dean of the Wisconsin Business School. Other universities have managed to raise substantial amounts of money by naming their business schools after generous donors (think Carlson, Tuck, Goizueta, Sloan, etc.). But Knetter did something far more impressive. He managed to . . .