Concrete, precise, and specific language makes donors feel heard.

Wharton’s Jonah Berger and York University’s Grant Packard analyzed customer service interactions to understand what moves customer satisfaction.  It wasn’t compensation, tone, or empathy training, it was word choice. Increasing linguistic concreteness by one standard deviation improved customer satisfaction by 9% and actual spending by 13%. In a separate email study, customers spent 30 percent more with a retailer in the weeks following interactions where employees used more concrete language.

This is money left on the table in donor services. You don’t need another campaign, a new ask strategy, or a redesigned giving page. You need your staff to talk differently. Think of it as donor equity: good donor service interaction = higher satisfaction = more giving.   Your donor service team will be rightly clamoring for attribution.

The obvious version of less/more concrete easy to spot.

• “We’ll look into that” vs.  “I’ll immediately review your donation record and ensure any errors are corrected by end of today.”

The subtler version is more interesting:

• “I’ll fix that issue” versus “I’ll correct that issue.”

Fix is general-purpose while Correct implies an error was made and that someone is taking ownership. That’s an important distinction to a  donor who feels wronged.  What is the dynamic behind this finding?  Concrete language makes people feel seen, heard, and valued not because it’s clearer, but because it signals that the person speaking is actually listening. Specificity reads as attentiveness and abstraction reads as script-following.

The same dynamic plays out in fundraising language itself, and we have data on it. In primary research testing three ways to describe the same mission, donors were asked which phrasing better helped them understand the need an organization addresses, and which felt more emotionally powerful:

• “Too many families in our community are going hungry”
• “Too many families in our community are experiencing hunger”
• “Too many families in our community are experiencing food insecurity”

The first statement, the most concrete, easily won on comprehension and emotional power.  The phrase your program officers and grant writers reach for instinctively, the one that sounds most professional and considered, finished last on both measures. The abstract framing doesn’t make the problem feel more serious, it makes it feel like it’s happening to someone else.

There’s a long-running institutional debate about whether to describe people as “homeless” or “experiencing homelessness,” as “drug addicts” or “people with substance use disorders.” The person-first framing is well-intentioned and I understand the argument. Putting the person before the condition is meant to signal humanity.

The research is considerably messier than the institutional consensus implies. The people closest to the condition frequently want to own it, not soften it.

My own qualitative research bore this out. Everyone I interviewed described themselves plainly: I’m an addict, I’m homeless. Not as resignation, but as ownership. To name something directly, without cushioning, was an act of autonomy. It fit, and fitting mattered more to them than the comfort of whoever was listening.

One gentleman, when I asked his reaction to “experiencing homelessness,” didn’t hesitate:

“Experiencing homelessness? This isn’t a fucking Disney ride. I am homeless, and it sucks.”

There’s a pattern across all of this – abstraction tends to serve the speaker, not the listener. Concrete language asks something of you: it requires that you actually pay attention to who’s in front of you and say what’s true. In donor service, in fundraising copy, in how we talk about people and their circumstances, that’s the work.

Kevin