Non-profit financial organizations increased by 20% between 2017 and 2023, but their compliance with submitted reports dropped by as much as 17 percentage points. We implemented an email-based intervention in which we varied its personalized content between informative and deterrent (i.e., an infographic summary or a checklist of financial risk warnings) and the message recipient (i.e., the manager alone, or the manager and the board of directors).

We use administrative panel data from 2019 to 2024 and estimate Difference-in-Differences models to identify causal effects on reporting behavior. We find that sending the email to the board increases compliance. For the set of firms without data about the board, we only randomized the message content and find that informative messages increase compliance, but deterrent messages do not work. Our results remark the need to strengthen the visibility and role of the board of directors in these institutions in developing contexts where regulatory authorities have limited enforcement capacities.