I got a cold text donation ask for Ukraine relief with this gift string:

• $120 repairs a damaged roof and broken windows
• $100 provides psychosocial counseling for one person
• $295 delivers emergency essentials to a family.

There is a version of this that makes sense inside the organization. Someone probably had to get three different people to bless the equivalencies, and by the time everyone was done negotiating, the gift string had the behavioral flow of a shopping cart with one square wheel.

Here’s what the DonorVoice behavioral science team had to say:

1. The first problem is dollar amounts that neither ascend nor descend. A rising ladder says, “choose how far you want to climb.” A descending ladder says, “here is the big gift, and here is a relief valve.” This does neither.
2. Also, the first number tends to act as a door, not an anchor. Could $120 be defensible? Maybe the phone number or ZIP was matched to census data, wealth signals, property data or some other model that said this person could tolerate a higher ask. But it’s still a cold text, and that puts it in the category of smelling faintly of scam, even when it’s legit. That means the ask has to work harder to feel clear, safe and worth acting on.
3. Another issue is the benefit list. There are two basic ways to build one. A symmetrical list says, “$100 helps 10 people, $200 helps 20, $300 helps 30.” The donor does not have to compare different goods. They just choose scale, and the math is easy.

   An asymmetrical list is different benefits and amounts that could change at equal or unequal intervals. Perhaps the diverse list snags a wider net of interest if one person cares about shelter and another cares about trauma care. But the cost is cognitive load. Now the donor is comparing roofs to counseling to essentials. Is the $100 gift better because it is cheaper? Is $295 more urgent? The donor has been promoted from helper to unpaid logistics manager.

4. There is a related, subtler problem: the ask keeps changing who the donor is helping. First it’s a family, then a person, then a family again. That breaks the donor’s mental picture. Each shift makes the donor restart the story, and momentum can leak out.
5. The deepest problem is the job the gift is being hired to do. Donors are not buying a repair kit. They are helping a family keep rain out of a damaged home. They are not buying “psychosocial counseling,” which is the sort of phrase that should be kept in a locked cabinet with grant reports and conference lanyards. They are helping someone recover after living through shelling, displacement and fear.

   The copy gives the donor program outputs and makes them translate those outputs into human outcomes. Some friction is good. Asking a donor to picture the cold air coming through broken windows can pull them deeper into the moment. That is useful mental work. Asking them to decode three unrelated price points and compare three different categories is not useful work.

What’s your take?

Kevin