Thank-You Calls Show No Impact on Giving

The Theory

Thanking donors is widely considered crucial among fundraising practitioners and experts. Two researchers wanted to explore just how much of a difference thank-you calls make. Their findings revealed something entirely unexpected.

The Test

Anya Samek, behavioral economist at the University of Southern California, teamed up with Chuck Longfield, who recently retired as chief scientist for Blackbaud. Seventy public TV stations and one large national nonprofit provided information on more than half a million donors who made their first contributions to the organizations from 2011 through 2016.

The researchers randomly assigned some of the donors to get calls thanking them for their gift and discussing its impact, although they weren’t asked to give again. The rest didn’t get calls.

The Results

Donor responses were monitored for a minimum of one year and up to five years after the thank-you calls were made. The research found no impact of thank-you calls on future giving regardless of the size of the initial gift. About 28 percent of donors to the public TV stations and 31 percent of donors to the large national nonprofit made repeat gifts. Those rates were the same regardless of whether donors received thank-you calls. The researchers also found that thank-you calls had no impact on the size of subsequent gifts among donors who gave again.

Dig Deeper

Samek says she and Longfield didn’t embark on the study to upend conventional wisdom about thank-you calls or hurt the fundraising industry. “We were really excited and hoped they’d work because so many people do them,” she says.

However, given that it costs about $1 per call to outsource the task, financially stretched nonprofits need to know whether the calls help.

“I report what I see. We have to discuss the data,” Samek says.

Samek encouraged nonprofits that typically make thank-you calls to do their own testing by not calling 10 percent of their donor pool and see if the rate of subsequent gifts varies.

Find it

“Do Thank-You Calls Increase Charitable Giving? Expert Forecasts and Field Experimental Evidence” by Anya Samek in the department of economics at the University of Southern California and Chuck Longfield, former chief scientist at Blackbaud, is a paper published in SSRN.

Dan Parks is the Chronicle’s senior editor for digital and data.