Authors: Kubo, Takahiro; Yokoo, Hide-Fumi;Veríssimo, Diogo;

Financial shortages hamper biodiversity conservation. Fundraising using digital marketing measures can help address financial shortages in conservation. However, there is little evidence concerning the efficiency of digital efforts compared with the traditional approaches. We conducted real-world field experiments using Facebook and mailshot advertisements to understand how digital and traditional conservation fundraising approaches perform. Specifically, both experiments compared three types of message frames: Simple, Seed money, and Ecological.
The current study found that advertising costs on Facebook exceeded the donation amounts, although the opposite was true for the traditional approach. Also, the message framing focused on Seed money, which emphasizes the amount already donated, outperformed the ecological framing focused on threatened species. These findings demonstrate that fundraising using digital marketing has unique challenges, and traditional strategies cannot be simply replaced with digital measures. Further collaboration of practitioners and researchers will provide rigorous behavioural evidence to develop effective and efficient fundraising in conservation.