Asking for a friend: Reminders and incentives for crowdfunding college savings

Given the importance of college savings and the novel technologies that make gifting more accessible, new programs have been developed to increase college savings contributions among families and friends. Backer, an online college-savings platform that allows 529 account holders to "crowdfund'' their child's education by inviting a team of contributors, is one of the first and largest organizations to facilitate such contributions among families and friends. We conducted a field experiment to examine the impact of a suite of interventions aimed at increasing both parent contributions through visual reminders and the contributions of family members and friends through account incentives. We find that visual reminders significantly increased the amount of contributors and the frequency of contributions. We find similar effects for a combination of visual reminders and relatively large recruitment incentives. This pattern of results indicates that it is likely the reminder component of the interventions, rather than the incentives themselves, that drove the improvements in study outcomes.