A new government report has found that automatically adding a donation to a customer’s restaurant bill, and giving them the option to opt-out, is the most effective way of encouraging giving from diners. 

The report comes from the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), which was set up last year by the government to find ‘intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves’, such as giving up smoking or using energy efficiently.

One of its policy areas is making it easy and transparent to give. The BIT Team recommends that “prompted choice on the edges of a financial transaction, has the potential to form the habit of giving money to charity.”

It cites a study done in the Jamie Oliver-inspired restaurant, Fifteen Cornwall. The BIT team tested the effects of message framing, donation by default, engaging customers’ reciprocity and the effects of focusing on individual charity recipients.

It found using defaults to be the most effective. Donations provided in envelopes left on diners’ tables elicited on average 15p per diner. On other days, when £1 per diner was automatically added to customers’ bills, average donations were 83p. This represents a charitable donation of 1.2 per cent of the average diner’s restaurant spend.

The report says: “While Fifteen Cornwall is unusual as a charitable restaurant, if half of this effect was replicated across all UK restaurants (£9bn sales) it could generate donations of over £50m.”

It recommends that their should be further pilots in this area, such as local restaurants setting a default 1- 2 per cent donation on bills that people can opt out if they choose.