A Field Experiment in Local Personalization for Charitable Crowdfunding

Charitable crowdfunding platforms use personalized outreach to engage donors and increase contributions, often leveraging cognitive heuristics such as home bias (an inclination towards local projects) and social influence (an inclination towards personal connections). While both heuristics can shape giving behavior, they may not always align, and prior literature offers limited insight into how they interact or which dominates in practice. We address this gap through a large-scale randomized field experiment with nearly 160,000 donors on a major charitable crowdfunding platform. In this experiment, donors who had previously supported non-local projects were randomly assigned to receive one of two types of personalized emails: (1) local personalization, which highlighted projects in the donor’s billing location, or (2) default personalization, which highlighted projects from the same community as the donor’s most recently supported project. Results show that local personalization increased engagement and donations overall, even among donors without prior evidence of home bias, suggesting that geographic cues can activate latent heuristics. However, among donors with a history of giving via social influence, local personalization increased engagement but not the likelihood of a donation. Moreover, local personalization disproportionately directed funds toward affluent communities demographically similar to the donor’s own, reinforcing a rich-get-richer dynamic. These findings highlight the behavioral power and equity risks of simple personalization strategies, offering insights for platform design and the responsible use of heuristics in charitable crowdfunding.