Nonprofits have long known that how you ask for money can affect the amount donors give. New research quantifies how big a difference it can make: The study found that donors gave 57 percent larger gifts when they were asked to donate units of food for refugees compared with when they were simply asked to give cash.
When “donors are asked to fund units of the charitable good instead of being directly asked for money, it can have great potential for fundraising,” says Raphael Epperson, lead researcher on the project.
The online study involved 8,673 participants who were asked to complete a task and told they could receive $90 at the end of the project. They were asked if they wanted to donate part of that money to a refugee charity. The participants were shown several options for how they could give, with the goal of comparing giving via cash or giving as units of goods. When given the option to provide units of a meal paste for refugee children, experiment participants were told $1 provided a daily ration of food. The donors could give meals in a small-unit size ($1 for a daily ration) or a large-unit size ($30 for a monthly ration).
The results showed that asking for donations with the large-unit size garnered 57 percent larger donations than asking for money — large-unit donors gave $42.35, on average, compared with cash donors, who gave $26.94. However, donations made in the small-unit size averaged $24.25, about 10 percent less than cash. So, picking the right unit size to ask for mattered.
Asking for large-unit donations maximized total dollars raised, but fewer donors gave when asked that way. More donors were willing to give at the small-unit size. Epperson says this suggests that nonprofits that ask for unit donations need to figure out their goals and what works best with their donors.
“If you as a charity say, ‘O.K., the most important thing for now is to attract more donors,’ then maybe a small-unit size is preferable,” Epperson says. “If you say, ‘O.K., I want to maximize donation income from the campaign,’ then maybe a unit donation [campaign] with a large-unit size is preferable.”
Epperson says that in a pre-experiment, researchers found that a typical donation was $10, so they made the large-unit donation ask bigger than that and the small-unit donation ask smaller. A charity that has good historical data on donation size, he says, can use that as a starting point for figuring out good unit sizes to ask for.
Don’t Mix Unit Info
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ith Dollar Requests
The researchers also wondered if telling people how much their money could do in unit sizes and then asking for money, rather than units of charitable goods, would affect how much donors gave. It did — and not in a good way. Telling people they could feed a child for $1 a day or for $30 for a month and then asking for a monetary donation resulted in smaller gifts — an average of $3 less with the daily figure and $5 less with the monthly figure.
“If I tell you, ‘Hey, you can feed a child for a day for a dollar,’ you might think, ‘O.K., I can give that,’” Epperson says. “Already a dollar is enough. So people start to give less.”
Epperson says that while the results might be surprising, it’s important for fundraisers to have data-based strategies rather than simply using tactics because others had done so. In the experiment, people gave both when asked for money and unit donations, but he says the results showed that “even seemingly small differences can have a huge impact” on how much the donors chose to give.
Epperson says charities should consider trying a unit donation approach, because the practice can be used in a wide variety of nonprofits, not just those providing meals, clothing, or other durable goods.
“It might be more applicable than it seems,” he says. “You also have units of services, like we’re providing education to X amount of people. There are many situations where you can still use unit donation.”
