Setting targets and fundraising for individual events, rather than mass charity-organised challenges, are key to the “perfect ask” and maximising online donations, new research by economists at the University of Warwick suggests.

Professor Kimberley Scharf (pictured), from the university's Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, led a team who analysed data from JustGiving to discover what determines fundraising success on the site.

The working paper, Online Fundraising – the perfect ask? aimed to find out if there was a winning fundraising formula.

The researchers found on average that people fundraising on their own for individual events received 25 donations and raised £853. People taking part in a mass event received 22 donations and raised £588.

Fundraisers who took part in a mass charity-organised event fared the worst – gaining an average of 16 donations and raising £439, the study shows.

Scharf said: “One reason for this could be that people perceive a lone fundraiser as being more committed to the cause so are more likely to donate. Interestingly, lone fundraisers are also the least likely to take part in further fundraising activity, which could reflect the amount of effort that goes into this kind of activity.”

The study found by analysing data from a sample of Facebook-linked fundraisers on the site that individuals fundraising for smaller charities, with incomes of less that £100,000, tended to raise more money.

The study also found that setting a target encouraged donors to give more. Around 80 per cent of the fundraising pages had a target, which was set at about £350.

Scharf said: “The data shows that pages with a target raise significantly more than pages without, on average around £122 more. It is not clear whether this difference is because people who want to raise more money set targets, and devote more effort to fundraising, or because targets have a positive effect on how much people give.”

But she said the data also shows that although donors will donate more to reach the target, they will give an average of £5 less once it has been reached.

“This suggests one possible strategy is for donors to set, and raise, successive targets to maintain levels of donations,” she said.

“We get bombarded by friends and work colleagues who have set up JustGiving pages for all kinds of fundraising activities. It is fascinating to look at the data behind these pages and get a clear idea of what motivates us to give to charity and how we choose to donate.”

The study presents insights on individual fundraising from micro-econometric analysis of JustGiving data. The largest data sample used was 416,313 fundraisers who were active JustGiving users at the time of an online survey that ran from October 2010 to April 2011. Data was also analysed on 10,597 runners in the 2010 London Marathon with fundraising pages on the site, and from a sample of 29,238 fundraisers who had linked their fundraising pages to their Facebook page.