Frame and Motivate: Testing strategies to increase participation in data donation studies.

Data protection laws in many jurisdictions grant users access to information that online platforms collect about them. Researchers capitalize on this legal requirement through data donation studies, where they ask users to request their personal data from an online platform and then share them as part of a survey. We experimentally tested two strategies to boost participation in a pre-registered study with over 2000 YouTube, Instagram or LinkedIn users from Germany: we varied (1) how we invited people, either framing the study as a web survey or directly describing it as a data donation study, and (2) the motivational appeals highlighting either prosocial advantages or personal gains from donating data.We found that neither study framing nor motivational appeals significantly affected people's willingness to donate data or their actual donation rates. However, framing the study from the start as data donation research led to significantly more people starting the study. Our results demonstrate that researchers need to consider how they design invitations to data donation studies, while revealing that study framing or motivational appeals fail to increase respondents' willingness to donate or their actual donation behavior.