{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-11-08T22:07:19.461Z"},"content":[{"type":"blog","id":"e22fe239-c9c8-4f6f-bab0-4272cfecea77","slug":"charity-donation-research-incentives","title":"Charity Donations as Research Incentives: For Participants Who Cannot Accept a Gift Card","url":"https://www.koji.so/blog/charity-donation-research-incentives","summary":"Offer a charity donation when a research participant cannot accept a personal gift, such as US federal employees, UK civil servants and staff under corporate gifts policies, but offer it as a choice next to a personal reward. US federal rules (5 CFR 2635.204) allow gifts of $20 or less per occasion and $50 a year from one source, never cash, and under 5 CFR 2635.203(f) a donation to a charity the employee designates still counts as an indirect gift. UK DfE guidance says not to use incentives with civil servants. Experiments (Warriner et al. 1996; Phoenix Area Social Survey 2017) find donation-only offers draw fewer people than cash or a choice. In Koji, participants claim an approved reward as a gift card, prepaid Visa card or charity donation through a 30-day link.","content":"Offer a charity donation when the person you want to interview is not allowed to accept a personal gift: civil servants, many public-sector and regulated-industry staff, and employees whose company caps or bans gifts from vendors. The best default is to **let every participant choose** between a personal reward and a donation, because the evidence says a donation-only offer draws fewer people than cash or a choice. And check one thing before you rely on a donation at all: under some rules, a donation to a charity the participant picks still counts as a gift to them.\n\n**Try it in Koji:** turn on **Offer an incentive** in a study's settings and set the amount. After you approve an interview, the participant gets a personal link to claim it as a gift card, a prepaid Visa card or a donation to charity, so the choice is theirs and you buy nothing by hand. Incentives are on every paid plan (Insights, Interviews and Enterprise).\n\nThis guide covers who usually cannot accept an incentive, what the research says about donations, how to word the offer, and when the honest answer is to pay nothing at all.\n\n## Who usually cannot accept a gift card\n\nMost rules that block research incentives were written for gifts from suppliers, not for research. They catch you anyway, because to the participant's employer you are an outside company handing their staff something of value.\n\n![Table of participants who often cannot accept a personal research incentive, the typical rule that applies to them and what to offer instead](/visuals/who-cannot-accept-research-incentives-table/who-cannot-accept-research-incentives-table.png \"Ask before you invite: the rule depends on the employer, not on your study · Source: 5 CFR 2635.204; UK Department for Education user research guidance\")\n\nThe common cases:\n\n- **US federal employees.** The executive-branch ethics rules (5 CFR 2635.204) let an employee accept unsolicited gifts worth **$20 or less per occasion**, up to **$50 a year from any one source**, and the exception does not cover cash. Your company counts as one source, whoever on your team sends the reward.\n- **UK civil servants.** The Department for Education's user research guidance says incentives should not be used for research with civil servants or other people working for the civil service, such as contractors and suppliers. It also says not to pay friends or family, and that paying incentives should not be a default position.\n- **Staff under a corporate gifts policy.** Many companies cap the value of gifts from vendors, or require approval above a small amount. This matters most when you interview your own B2B customers: the person who uses your product is often the person most bound by their employer's vendor rules.\n- **Friends and family of the team.** Not barred by law, but paying them muddies why they said yes. The same DfE guidance advises against it.\n\nUniversity staff, healthcare workers and people in regulated finance often have their own rules too. You will not know them in advance, so ask.\n\n## The rule most teams miss: a donation they choose can still be a gift\n\nThe usual workaround is \"we'll donate to a charity of your choice\". For US federal employees that is exactly what the rules treat as an indirect gift. Under 5 CFR 2635.203(f), a gift given to another person, **including a charitable organisation, on the basis of the employee's designation or recommendation**, counts as accepted by the employee. The regulation's own example is an employee who has to decline a computer and may not suggest it go to a charity instead.\n\nSo for federal staff, a donation the participant directs is not a clean way around the limit. The options that hold up are:\n\n1. Offer no incentive, and say why in the invitation.\n2. Have your company make a donation to a charity **you** pick, unconnected to any one participant's choice, and check with the participant's ethics office first.\n3. Ask the participant to check with their ethics office, and follow what they say.\n\nOther employers' policies are usually looser, and a donation is often the thing that makes participation possible. But the principle is the same: the participant's employer decides, so ask them to check.\n\n## Does a donation work as well as paying people?\n\nUsually not on its own, and the evidence is fairly consistent.\n\n- In a Canadian mail survey experiment (Warriner, Goyder and colleagues, *Public Opinion Quarterly*, 1996), prepaid cash of $2, $5 or $10 raised response, while a promised donation of $2 to $10 to charity on the respondent's behalf showed no measurable effect. The overall response rate after three follow-ups was **70.7%**; the title of the paper sums it up: \"Charities, No; Lotteries, No; Cash, Yes\".\n- In a 2017 field experiment in the Phoenix Area Social Survey, with about **1,400** requests and incentives of $10, $20 and $30, offering cash, or a choice of cash or a donation, worked equally well, and both did better than offering only a donation of the same amount.\n\nTwo caveats for user research. These are surveys of the public, not 30-minute interviews with professionals, and for a participant whose only alternative is nothing, a donation may well be what tips them into saying yes. The takeaway is about defaults: **do not make donation the only option for everyone.** Offer a choice, and keep the donation for the people who want it or need it.\n\n## How to word the offer\n\nThe wording matters more than the amount for people who cannot be paid. Say what you offer, say there is a choice, and give them an easy way to check their own rules. Three versions you can adapt:\n\n**For any participant:**\n> As a thank-you for 20 minutes of your time, we will send you €30 after the interview. You can take it as a gift card, a prepaid card or a donation to charity.\n\n**For someone who may work under a gifts policy:**\n> Some employers do not allow staff to accept gifts from suppliers. If that applies to you, you can take the thank-you as a donation to charity instead, or decline it. Taking part is just as welcome either way.\n\n**For civil servants or anyone you know cannot accept anything:**\n> We are not able to offer an incentive for this study, because of the rules on gifts to public servants. We will share a short summary of what we learned and what we change because of it.\n\nThat last line is not a consolation prize. For B2B customers and public servants, seeing that their time changed something is often the reason they agree to the next study. Our guide to [research participant incentives](/docs/research-participant-incentives) covers amounts by audience, and [incentive strategies](/docs/incentive-strategies) covers when and how to pay.\n\n## Decide before you send the invitation\n\n![Flowchart for deciding whether to offer a research participant a reward, a donation or nothing, depending on their employer's rules](/visuals/charity-donation-incentive-decision-flowchart/charity-donation-incentive-decision-flowchart.png \"Settle this before the invitation goes out, so the offer you make is one they can accept\")\n\nThe order matters. Find out whether the participant's employer restricts gifts, then decide whether they can take a personal reward, a donation or nothing, and only then write the invitation. Changing the offer after someone has agreed reads as a bait and switch.\n\n## When your participants are your customers\n\nCustomer success teams run more interviews with existing customers than anyone else: onboarding, renewal, churn and win-loss calls. These are the people most likely to sit under a vendor gifts policy, because you are literally their vendor.\n\n![A customer success manager on a video call with a customer, talking through how the customer uses the product day to day](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1713946598691-173f44f13dc9?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w5NDUzMDN8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHw2fHx0d28lMjBwZW9wbGUlMjB2aWRlbyUyMGNhbGwlMjBsYXB0b3AlMjBvZmZpY2V8ZW58MXwwfHx8MTc5NDEyMDYxNHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080)\n\n_Photo by [Vitaly Gariev](https://unsplash.com/@silverkblack?utm_source=koji&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=koji&utm_medium=referral)_\n\nA few habits that keep these studies clean:\n\n- **Ask the account owner first.** They usually know whether the customer's procurement team bans gifts.\n- **Keep the amount modest.** The point is a thank-you, not a payment that someone has to declare. If you are interviewing a buyer during a renewal, a large reward can look like an inducement.\n- **Offer the choice to everyone.** If only some participants get a donation option, it is obvious who is restricted.\n- **Pay after the interview.** It keeps the offer clearly a thank-you for time already given.\n\nFor churned customers, who owe you nothing, the reward matters more. Our guide to [B2B recruitment without a panel](/blog/b2b-participant-recruitment-without-a-panel) covers reaching them.\n\n## How it works in Koji\n\nKoji handles the reward inside the study, so you are not buying codes and tracking them in a spreadsheet:\n\n1. **Turn it on.** In the study's settings, switch on **Offer an incentive** and set one amount per participant, from €10 to €500.\n2. **Top up the rewards balance** for the workspace, from the study page or Usage. Only rewards you approve are paid.\n3. **The participant gives an email** on the thank-you screen at the end of a text or voice interview.\n4. **You approve or decline** each reward on the study's Interviews page, with the interview's quality score beside it, or approve them all at once. Koji flags it when the same reward email appears more than once in a study.\n5. **The participant claims it.** Koji emails a personal link, valid for 30 days, where they choose a gift card, a prepaid Visa card or a donation to charity.\n\n![Koji quality rating card scoring an interview Excellent with relevance, depth, coverage and completion scores](/email/shots/shot-rating-details.jpg \"You see each interview's quality score when you decide whether to approve its reward\")\n\nLimits worth knowing: a person can receive up to €1,500 in rewards a year, rewards are not offered in some countries that banking rules exclude, the offer appears in text and voice interviews (not phone calls), and people recruited through Koji's panel are paid by the panel instead. Incentives are on the Insights, Interviews and Enterprise plans.\n\nNote what the donation option does **not** solve: the participant still chooses it, so for US federal employees it is the kind of designated gift the rules count. For those studies, turn the incentive off and use the third wording above. Our post on [research incentive management](/blog/research-incentive-management-2026) compares Koji with separate incentive tools, and [incentives and taxes](/docs/research-participant-incentive-taxes) covers what participants may need to declare.\n\n## Common mistakes\n\n- **Making donation the only option.** The evidence says it draws fewer people than a choice. Keep it as one option.\n- **Promising \"a donation to the charity of your choice\" to a federal employee.** That is the case the rules call an indirect gift.\n- **Finding out about the policy after the interview.** Then you either break their rules or withdraw a promised thank-you. Ask first.\n- **Big amounts for existing customers.** Keep it a thank-you, not something they have to declare to procurement.\n- **Treating \"no incentive\" as no thanks.** Send the summary you promised. It is the reason they will say yes next time.\n\n## Start with your next customer study\n\nBefore your next round of customer interviews, add one line to the invitation offering a choice of reward or donation, and one line inviting people to tell you if their employer limits gifts. If you run the study in Koji, turn on **Offer an incentive** and the gift card, prepaid card or donation choice is built into the claim link. [Start a study](https://www.koji.so), or read [how to interview existing customers](/blog/interview-existing-customers-without-thirty-calls) for the recruitment side.\n\n**Sources:** US Office of Government Ethics, Standards of Ethical Conduct, 5 CFR 2635.203(f) and 2635.204(a). UK Department for Education, user research guidance, \"Paying incentives\". Keith Warriner, John Goyder and colleagues, \"Charities, No; Lotteries, No; Cash, Yes: Main Effects and Interactions in a Canadian Incentives Experiment\", *Public Opinion Quarterly* 60(4), 1996. Phoenix Area Social Survey incentive experiments, Arizona State University, 2017.\n","category":"Research","lastModified":"2026-11-08T07:20:14.396348+00:00","metaTitle":"Charity Donation Research Incentives: When Gift Cards Are Not Allowed","metaDescription":"Who cannot accept research incentives, why a donation they choose may still count as a gift, what experiments say about donations vs cash, and wording to use.","keywords":["charity donation research incentive","participants cannot accept gift cards","research incentive public sector employees","donation instead of incentive","federal employee research incentive","b2b interview incentive policy"],"aiSummary":"Offer a charity donation when a research participant cannot accept a personal gift, such as US federal employees, UK civil servants and staff under corporate gifts policies, but offer it as a choice next to a personal reward. US federal rules (5 CFR 2635.204) allow gifts of $20 or less per occasion and $50 a year from one source, never cash, and under 5 CFR 2635.203(f) a donation to a charity the employee designates still counts as an indirect gift. UK DfE guidance says not to use incentives with civil servants. Experiments (Warriner et al. 1996; Phoenix Area Social Survey 2017) find donation-only offers draw fewer people than cash or a choice. In Koji, participants claim an approved reward as a gift card, prepaid Visa card or charity donation through a 30-day link.","aiKeywords":["charity donation incentive","research participant incentives","gift card restrictions","federal gift rules","civil servants user research","incentive wording","Koji incentives"],"aiContentType":"guide","faqItems":[{"answer":"Yes, and it is the right option for participants whose employer bars personal gifts. Offer it as a choice next to a personal reward rather than as the only option, because experiments find donation-only offers draw fewer people than cash or a choice.","question":"Can I offer a charity donation instead of a research incentive?"},{"answer":"Only within the gift rules: unsolicited gifts of $20 or less per occasion and $50 a year from one source, and not cash. A donation to a charity the employee picks can still count as an indirect gift to them, so ask them to check with their ethics office or offer no incentive.","question":"Can US federal employees accept research incentives?"},{"answer":"The Department for Education's user research guidance says incentives should not be used for research with civil servants or people working for the civil service, such as contractors and suppliers. Thank them and share what you learned instead.","question":"Should UK civil servants be paid for user research?"},{"answer":"Usually not on their own. A 1996 Canadian experiment found prepaid cash raised response while promised donations did not, and a 2017 Phoenix Area Social Survey experiment found cash or a choice of cash or donation beat a donation-only offer.","question":"Do charity donations work as well as cash for recruiting participants?"},{"answer":"Turn on Offer an incentive in the study settings and set the amount. After you approve an interview, Koji emails the participant a link, valid for 30 days, where they choose a gift card, a prepaid Visa card or a donation to charity. Incentives are on the Insights, Interviews and Enterprise plans.","question":"How do I let participants choose a donation in Koji?"}],"relatedTopics":["research incentives","participant recruitment","B2B customer interviews","research ethics","customer success research"]}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}