Spontaneous charitable donations in Sweden before and after COVID: A natural experiment

Did the outbreak of COVID‐19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish—a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity—each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish‐payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish‐donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January–February and during the summer months, and more donations in April–May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish‐donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time‐series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak.