Tread Carefully When Trying to Make Gifts More Meaningful

A new research study concludes that fundraisers should be careful about how they attempt to make charitable gifts more meaningful.

In the 2013 study one group of donors who were solicited door-to-door were asked if they wanted to include a personal message in a greeting card with their donation. Those donors turned out less likely to make any contribution at all—and the ones who did write messages gave about the same amount as those in the control group (who weren’t given the message opportunity).

The researchers from the University of Pennsylvania were surprised with the results and concluded that the opportunity to include a personal message increased the psychological “cost” of giving.

“Increasing the meaning associated with giving did not lead to significant increases in donation amounts,” the researchers said in the conclusion of “‘Feel the Warmth’ Glow: A Field Experiment on Manipulating the Act of Giving.” “Fundraisers should be careful to consider the potential effects of solicitation approaches on the cost of giving— either from social cost, cognitive cost, or time cost.”

The researchers worked with high school students in the Chicago suburb of Flossmoor who go door to door every fall to raise money for materials to make blankets for families in need. The student club, called Feel the Warmth, makes the blankets and gives them to a charity to distribute in the nearby disadvantaged suburb of Chicago Heights.

The high school students solicited more than 1,500 homes, asking half of the prospective donors if they wanted to write a message in a card along with making a donation. The researchers hypothesized that the handwritten message would increase the meaning of the gift—and that those donors would thus give more. But the hypothesis turned out to be wrong.

Soliciting door to door for small amounts—the average gift was $11-$15—is certainly not the same as asking for planned gifts. But the point is well-taken that fundraisers cannot assume what strategies will increase gift numbers or amounts. Providing the opportunity to write a personal message seems fairly innocuous—and yet it backfired in this study.

Of the one-third of homes where the door was answered, 52 percent of the control group made donations, while only 43 percent of the “treatment group” did so—a statistically significant difference. The researchers found that offering the personalized message “crowded out” small donations—$5 or less. They theorized that offering the message increased the cost to those donors: It wasn’t worth their time, or they might have felt embarrassed about giving such a small gift (social cost), or it took too much thought (cognitive cost) to make several decisions at the front door (to give or not to give, to write or not to write, what to write).

Much more surprising to the researchers was that there was no statistically significant donation difference between those who wrote messages and those who did not. The researchers speculated on a couple of possible reasons for their hypothesis not panning out: One is that door-to-door solicitations are “cold” donors and that the results might have been different with a “warm list” of those known to be altruistically motivated.

More interesting for those in planned giving is another possible reason: that offering the personalized message shouldn’t have been “administered simultaneously with the ask.” Complicating a request with a simultaneous offer may prevent the offer from enhancing the gift’s meaning.

Timing, as they say, is everything.