Donate, Donate, Donate – In Case You Missed the First One.
You need to repeat the ask. That’s one of the more durable recommendations I see, passed down like gospel. What’s to be inferred from this? Donors won’t notice the ask unless it’s repeated? They won’t know the intent absent many asks? Maybe its once for awareness, twice for clarity, three times for action?
But what if they already know? We showed a panel of donors a set of direct mail envelopes, standard nonprofit fare, and asked what the purpose was.
Eighty-four percent said, “They’re asking for money.” How might they know just by looking at the envelope? The same way I know the sun comes up in the East. Donors have years, decades maybe, of exposure to envelopes from you, your competitors, and every other cause on the planet. Their brains have done what human brains do best: automate recognition. It’s a memory feedback loop, after enough repetition, the pattern becomes hardwired.
You see the format, your brain fires a prediction: I know what this is. That’s efficient cognition to help us move through the world without processing every piece of mail as if it were new. But it’s fatal to attention because when everything looks the same, the brain tunes out before the letter’s even opened.
Inside the Envelope: What We Measured
Half our panel read a typical “best practice” letter, the kind that interrupts the story three times with dollar amounts and urgency. Half read a DonorVoice version: complete story arc, full resolution, a single “soft”, autonomy-supportive ask, no dollar handles.
After reading, we measured three constructs from motivation science:
- Competence — “I felt confident I understood what was being asked of me.” “I felt capable of taking the action described in the letter.”
- Relatedness — “I felt the sender understands people like me.” “I felt a meaningful connection to the people and places in the letter.”
- Autonomy — “I felt free to decide whether and how to support.” “I felt the letter respected my choices without pressure.”
Higher scores on these dimensions predict higher-quality motivation, meaning people act because they want to, not because they feel pressured to and that distinction matters. High-quality motivation sustains behavior; low-quality motivation drives short bursts and fast attrition.
Compared to the “best practice” control, the DonorVoice letter increased all three:
- Competence: +2.25 points (on a 7-point scale)
- Relatedness: +1.49
- Autonomy: +1.39
That’s not a rounding error, it’s a different psychological experience. The “three-ask” model triggered the familiar pressure response as readers knew what it was, felt the demand, and felt less innate motivation to give as a result. The DonorVoice letter broke that pattern, restoring a sense of agency and connection. People felt capable and respected, not managed.
Repeating the ask tells the donor, “You didn’t hear me the first time,” when in reality, they heard you years ago, in every piece of mail that looked just like this one.
If the envelope already signals fundraising, then the letter’s only job is to foster connection and innate motivation. Breaking that loop through a complete story, tailored to the person (Identity and trait), a clear articulation of the need and solution and a soft, agency supportive ask is the behavioral unlock.
It would be a strange world indeed where donors didn’t already know you’re asking for money.
Kevin
8 responses to “Donate, Donate, Donate – In Case You Missed the First One.”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Thanks so much for raising this. Yes, capturing donor information can be helpful for stewardship like newsletters, thank-you letters, impact updates. But how you ask matters. Forcing full data capture introduces friction that can significantly depress conversion, many donors may simply abandon the process. Beyond the friction itself, required fields also shift the emotional experience […]
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Unlike holidays that everyone already knows, Giving Tuesday is a created event. Many donors recognize the name but not the exact timing, so referencing it becomes a helpful cue. It serves as a reminder and taps into social norm activation (“everyone’s giving today”), which boosts response. However, we still want it paired with the mission, […]
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When a subject line leads with the match (“Your gift matched!”), it risks triggering market-norm thinking: the sense that giving is a financial transaction rather than an act rooted in values, identity, and care. This shift reduces intrinsic motivation and, over time, can weaken donor satisfaction and long-term engagement. It also makes the email indistinguishable […]
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There’s no evidence that QR codes suppress mid-value giving; all available research suggests they either help or have no negative effect. In fact, behavioral and usability research consistently shows the opposite: reducing friction at any point in the donation process increases completion rates and total response. And that has nothing to do with capacity and […]
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What you’re experiencing is very common. Resistance often isn’t about capability, but about motivation quality. If board members feel pushed into fundraising, that triggers controlled motivation (low quality motivation) i.e. obligation, guilt, or fear of judgment, which often results in avoidance. Instead, we need to create conditions for volitional motivation (high quality motivation) by satisfying […]
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That’s a really thoughtful question, and you’re not the first to raise it. Many of our clients have been cautious about placing the ask at the very end. To address their concern, we’ve tested both approaches, and the results are clear: when the ask comes last, even if that means it appears on the second […]
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Was a letter actually sent? What were the results?
Hi Gayle, see the longer response to Tom who referenced your question. Thanks.
Thank you: a welcome addition to the body of knowledge … as ALWAYS!!! [More thanks @ Gayle G., for asking her revealing question….] >> But still I wondered – as a civilian practitioner who has almost never done a by-the-book A/B split test in his entire multi-decade career – whether the cited TEST: >>>
> which “showed a panel of donors” an appeal letter & then (I assume) asked those donors to read it. > In fact, not just read it … but read it ENTIRELY (again, I assume).
If all true, WHY would I trust this panel’s verdicts on the appeal in any of its parts? It’s not real life as the fundraising industry, for big and especially small charities, knows it.
Here’s my thinking: Once I’d trained as a copywriter and turned pro, my everyday assumption was that pretty much NO ONE in fact reads an entire letter. That at best 10-20% of the TARGET AUDIENCE reads ANY letter entirely (appeals sent from boring, repetitive charities fare even worse) … & that, in reality, the rest of the recipients either (mostly) discard the stuff … or try to “get it” as fast as humanly possible and decide yes or no within seconds. That’s MY working assumption, anyway, when creating stuff: that a suitably responsive audience will NOT read comprehensively; they’ll skim.
Does the skimmer reader have less familiarity and exposure to the fundraising appeal? It would seem they likely have more, meaning they are even more likely to know, with high certainty, what’s inside the envelope. Do they then need the ask repeated 3x? And if they skim the ask, once, twice or 3 times are they less likely to feel pressured than the non-skimmer?
We put a premium on research that get at why something works and that’s how I’d think about this. Why would a one-time only “soft” ask be felt differently than a 3x repeat of a hard ask with dollar amounts in it? And which feelings are better to foster inside a person?
That underlying knowledge serves as ballast in an always stormy, noisy real-life testing world. We’ve done hundreds of in-market tests – A/B splits, A/B/C splits, multivariate, longitudinal, geo-lift etc. And all of those are guided by theory, a reason to believe in the test by understanding why it might work. And yet, humans are messy and external noise (i.e. factors that we don’t know about that matter) often drowns out any given result. A great example, a 15 way split test in market. Huge samples. There were very clear, “statistically significant” winners and losers, the agency instantly fit a story to the results. The problem? A mailing screwup, everyone got the exact same appeal. If you do one in-market test or 1,000 remember to recognize it for what it is, a tiny bit of signal or maybe, a lot of noise. Have humility, human’s lives will always dwarf our best thinking on any given test.
But, our best thinking is what should still dictate what goes in-market. So, consider this basic research vs. applied but please, do consider it.
We have tested our version of an appeal against best practice many times and our version tends to win out – not every time mind you, these are messy humans. We put extra weight on moving in the right direction and that can be hard to discern when progress is a squiggly line. Hence our emphasis in understanding why and applying it, regardless of a single A/B test. And our emphasis with client on revenue as the only metric that matters. The bank account don’t lie. Way too many agencies “fundraise” like crazy, mistaking activity for outcomes while the bank account shrinks. You can stack up lots of “winning” A/B tests and still be losing the skirmish, the battle and the war.
Humans are messy. Amen to that. Thank you, Kevin, for that in-depth explanation. Much appreciated. ~ tom
I think the most important sentence in the article is this one: “If the envelope already signals fundraising, then the letter’s only job is to foster connection and innate motivation.” Thank you for another excellent and actionable article!
Thank you Jim and especially glad you see it as actionable, we certainly do but seems it doesn’t always translate.
Thank you for this! What would be interesting is to see follow up results: retention, life-time value, commitment to and engagement with the organization …