Charitable Solicitation Update: New California Rules for Charitable Crowdfunding; Article on Cause-Related Marketing

California is working on the implementation of its new charitable crowdfunding law, which has an effective date of January 1, 2023. The Attorney General’s office has now released proposed regulations, with comments due by July 12th. For a summary of the proposed regulations, see this Adler & Colvin blog post. For more general coverage of the law’s adoption, see this For Purpose Law Group blog post.

In other solicitation developments, researchers at the University of Michigan recently published a study titled How does regulatory monitoring of cause marketing affect firm behavior and donations to charity?, International Journal of Research in Marketing (online 2022; hard copy publication pending). Here is the abstract:

Cause marketing (CM) typically involves for-profit firms donating part of their sales revenue to a charity, with the hope that this will increase their revenue. We argue that it is important for a regulator to monitor firms’ CM activities, and to assess how differences in the enforcement of CM laws impact the CM practice by firms. Our analytical model uses a Stackelberg leader–follower game that endogenizes the regulator’s decision to enforce CM. The firm then decides whether to truthfully declare or overstate the amount it contributes to charity (and if overstate: by how much). We find the following results in equilibrium under different conditions: (i) CM campaigns are a win–win–win situation – they increase profit for the firm while being truthful, generate larger donations for the charity, and generate a cause marketing surplus for the regulator, resulting in doing well while doing good, (ii) the best response of the firm is to be strategic, even when the regulator is strict with monitoring, (iii) the regulator itself decides not to monitor CM, even though it knows that this results in untruthful behavior by firms. When we endogenize the extent of overstatement, we find that the firm tends to be strategic by overstating donation percentage, whether the regulator is strict or not. As the proportion of unsophisticated consumers (who believe a firm’s claims, whether truthful or not) increases, the donation proportion decreases in general, and the overstatement level increases when the regulator is lenient and decreases when the regulator is strict. In equilibrium, the regulator is strict if the market size is large, and lenient otherwise. A survey with consumers supports key modeling assumptions regarding consumers’ lack of knowledge of CM laws.

Lloyd Mayer