Large anonymous donations may be made with the intention of boosting a charity’s reputation of quality, according to research released today by the University of Bristol.

The study of over 70,000 donations made via the London Marathon’s Virgin Money Giving pages in 2010 found that high-value donors may forego publicity, avoiding any perception that their donation is being made for private prestige, in order to build the reputation of the charity they are supporting.

“In our model, individuals will consider two factors when donating to charity: their total benefit from the public good and prestige received from donating. Thus, any donation made publicly offers only weak information about the quality of the charity, as any signal of this kind is mixed with the prestige-seeking behaviour of the donor,” say the report authors, Mike W. Peacey and Michael Sanders.

Peacey and Sanders’ paper, named Masked heroes: endogenous anonymity in charitable giving, uses a series of equations to decipher the characteristics of anonymous donations and their effect on donors. The research found that high anonymous donations encourage higher subsequent donations. While low-value anonymous donations did little to encourage later donors, high-value anonymous donations boosted the value of subsequent donations by an average of 4 per cent.

Some 12 per cent of the 73,584 donations studied were made anonymously and the study found that ‘extreme’ donations, those of the highest or lowest amounts, were more likely to be anonymous than public.

The average value of an anonymous donation was also found to be higher than the average value of a public donation - £39.48 compared to £29.64.