Ask more, make more is a very convenient theory of fundraising. At the campaign level, it often appears to work. Send another appeal and money comes back. Add another email and somebody clicks. Drop in an SMS and a few gifts appear. Revenue gets attributed to the contact, the spreadsheet turns green and the volume machine has its proof.

But that accounting skips a rather important participant in the transaction: the donor.

A field experiment with a charity that had never run a mass market, fundraising appeal pitted a standard appeal against essentially the same appeal with a handful of phrases suggesting that fundraising would continue: “year by year,” “over the long term,” “permanently” and similar cues.

Response rate barely budged but gift amount moved a lot.

Donors receiving the appeal with no hint of future appeals gave €71 vs. €46 for those receiving the version suggesting more fundraising was coming.

Takeaway: When people expect more fundraising, those who donate give less.

The economic logic is pretty simple. If I think another opportunity to give is coming, I can hold something back for later. Today’s gift and tomorrow’s gift compete with each other. The charitable pie may get bigger, but there is no reason to assume it expands in proportion to the number of solicitations we stuff into it.

Now consider how unusual the researchers’ setting was.

They deliberately chose an organization that had never fundraised this way before. That meant people’s expectations about whether this organization would ask were moved by a few words in a single appeal.

Consider your organization and countless others.

House-file donors have hardened, well-formed and well-earned expectations that plenty more solicitation is on the horizon. Acquisition donors aren’t exactly walking in fresh either. The same names are rented, modeled and mailed over and over, often by the same organizations as well as by everyone else fishing in roughly the same pool.  The donor may be new to your CRM but you are not new to their mailbox.

So if merely hinting at future solicitation was enough to lower gift amount in this experiment, what happens in a fundraising market where another ask isn’t a hint but near certainty.

That is where the usual “ask more, make more” logic starts to wobble.

Another mailing will produce gifts. Another email will produce gifts. Another SMS will produce gifts. But observing revenue after a solicitation does not tell you how much revenue the solicitation created.

Some of that money may have arrived next month anyway. Some may have gone to another campaign and some donors, per this study, may reduce the amount they give knowing there will always be another opportunity coming.

That is cannibalization, and our usual campaign reporting is almost perfectly designed not to see it.

The second finding from the study makes the problem more consequential.

A year later, the researchers solicited people again. Among those who gave in both years, the correlation between first- and second-year gift amount was .78. People who started high tended to stay high. People who started low tended to stay low. Once the researchers accounted for the first gift amount, most of the later treatment differences disappeared.

The authors call it habit formation. Whatever the label, gift amount is sticky.

That matches what we see in donor data. First gift amount is highly determinative of where a donor winds up. The great donor-upgrade story mostly lives in PowerPoint.  The first gift also has a useful mathematical property. On day one it is simultaneously the donor’s last gift, highest previous gift and average gift. They are all the same number.

Then they begin to diverge.

Our analysis of ask arrays has repeatedly found that average gift is a better basis for the first ask amount than two common defaults, last gift or highest previous. That fits the behavioral story. Donors appear to settle into a giving level and the average captures that level better than a single recent gift or an unusually large one.

Now put the two findings together.

Suppose a donor might otherwise have given $100. Years of solicitation have taught them there will be plenty more asks, so they give $50 today.  If this were purely a timing issue, perhaps they would give the other $50 next time. We would have moved money around the calendar but not changed much else.

But if $50 becomes the donor’s normal giving level then the expectation of future solicitation helped suppress today’s gift, and today’s lower gift helped establish tomorrow’s reference point.

We didn’t merely cannibalize the next gift, we helped make it smaller.

The Volume Model assumes more asking produces more money because every additional solicitation generates some revenue. The donor’s behavior suggests a different equation: more asking creates stronger expectations of more asking, those expectations can reduce what people give now, and what they give now can influence what they keep giving later.

The question we keep asking is whether another solicitation raises money.  It almost certainly will but that is a wildly incomplete answer.

The question worth answering is how much new giving it creates after accounting for what it takes from the donor’s next gift, the next campaign and the giving level we may be training them to adopt.

Kevin