Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that workers tended to put more effort into completing tasks if they knew that their favourite charity would be paid for it.
The study observed the online work-sharing platform PledgeWork. The site allows employers to post tasks and their corresponding costs on the platform, to be completed by volunteer workers. These volunteers may also choose a charity that they wish to support, unless one is already chosen by the employer. Once the task is completed and confirmed by the employer, the money for the task is donated to a specified charity.
The 28 participants in the research study were found to have done a better job at their tasks when knowing the pay would go to the United Nations, rather than their own bank accounts.
“We found that the charity group appeared to be more thorough than regular crowd workers who were performing a task solely to get paid,” said Keiko Katsuragawa, an adjunct professor in Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Participants who were told their pay would go to charity took more time and more care with the task perhaps because they weren’t trying to maximize their own earnings, but were undertaking the task as a contribution to a charity.”
According to researchers, this method of task assignment may help people overcome barriers to donating to charitable organizations. Volunteers are able to donate their labour, rather than money, while contributing to charity.
The paper detailing the new system titled “PledgeWork: Online Volunteering through Crowdwork,” was authored by Faculty of Mathematics researchers Katsuragawa, professor Edward Lank, and research assistant Qi Shu, was published in the Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.