Ask for little if you want to get loads. Snack size giving ads up!

Trendcentral.com writes this morning about new mobile apps that encourage do-gooding on the go.  

On the heels of Kickstarter came niche fundraising platforms like GiveForward and Pifworld, and now even video games are focused on saving the (real) world. New to the do-good scene are charitable mobile apps, which make it easy for users to lend a helping hand—whenever and wherever the mood strikes them.

WeFeedBack is a persuasive app that puts the developed world’s daily food expenditure in perspective. Enter the cost of a favorite food item into the calculator and it returns a startling figure: the number of hungry children that the same amount of money could feed. The math involved is simple; the food’s cost is multiplied by four, based on the World Food Programme’s estimate that it takes just 25 cents a day to feed one child. (One $9 panini, for example, is worth full meals for 36 kids). With its single-click option to “Feed Them Now” and engrossing global feedback tracker, the campaign has already collected the funds to feed more than 120,000 children.

An interesting study that shows the power of asking for little is Richard Wiseman´s charity experiment.Wiseman tested how willing people were to give, depending on what you asked for, and the results were stunning. The boxes saying "Every penny got 62 per cent of all contributions, while "Every pound helps" trailed in fourth place with just seven per cent of the total. http://www.quirkology.com/USA/Experiment_charity.shtml 

The same phenomenon can be applied on retail. Roger Dooley writes on his blog Neurosciencemarketing: "A second study found that exposing consumers to a “savings” message caused them to spend more than when they saw a “luxury” message. The authors of the paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found this counterintuitive and perhaps worrisome: "Companies may be trying to attract customers with slogans associated with saving money, but in fact, this strategy may make consumers spend more money than they would if they had not been exposed to the slogans."