When Do Equity Appeals Increase Giving? Evidence from Educational Crowdfunding

Equity appeals are increasingly used by digital fundraising platforms, nonprofits, and public institutions to direct attention and resources toward disadvantaged communities. However, it remains unclear whether and when equity appeals actually increase giving. We examine this question in the context of educational crowdfunding, where platforms explicitly focus on reducing funding disparities across schools, particularly for students from racial or ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds. Leveraging large-scale data from DonorsChoose, one of the largest educational crowdfunding platforms in the United States, and exploiting arbitrary cutoffs in the platform’s deployment of equity appeals based on the student composition of benefitting schools, we show that equity appeals increase fundraising when they highlight student disadvantage in terms of poverty while providing little to no measurable benefit when they highlight student disadvantage in terms of race. These differential effects reflect how donors interpret disadvantage. Many donors appear to view poverty as a legitimate and actionable barrier to learning, making poverty-based appeals effective. In contrast, perceptions of race as a structural barrier to educational opportunity are more heterogeneous and politically sensitive, limiting the impact of race-based appeals. For platform designers and policymakers seeking to reduce educational fundraising disparities, our findings highlight the importance of how equity appeals are framed. More broadly, our results contribute to understanding under what conditions behavioral nudges can meaningfully reduce inequality versus when alternative approaches may be necessary to achieve equitable outcomes.