Most year-end appeals get weeks of attention on the story, the headline, and the envelope. The ask amounts get about ten minutes, usually late in the process, and usually by copying whatever was on last year’s reply card: $25, $50, $100, $250, Other.
That’s a missed opportunity. The amounts you print are not decoration. Several field experiments with real donors and real mail show that suggested amounts change both how many people give and how much they give. And the single number that matters most is the first one.
Here’s what the research says, and how I’d use it to set ask amounts for your year-end appeal this fall.
Donors take your suggestions more literally than you think
When you print a list of amounts, many donors treat it as a menu, not a hint. A study with the Bavarian State Opera makes this easy to see. Researchers sent fundraising letters to about 19,500 patrons and randomly split them three ways: no suggested amount, a suggested gift of €100, or a suggested gift of €200.
The results, summarized by J-PAL, were striking. In the €100 group, 54.3% of donors gave exactly €100. Without a suggestion, only 17.9% gave that amount, and the most common gift was €50.
The higher suggestion also cut both ways. Participation fell from 3.1% with no suggestion to 2.3% with the €200 suggestion, a drop of about a quarter. But the average gift rose from €71.40 to €102.40, about 43% higher. Those two effects roughly canceled out, and the study found no significant change in revenue per letter.
So what? Suggested amounts are a lever, and the lever has a tradeoff. Push higher and you’ll usually get bigger gifts from fewer people. Whether that’s a good trade depends on who’s receiving the letter.
The first number does most of the work
One of the most useful studies for anyone designing a reply card comes from Arnaud De Bruyn and Sonja Prokopec, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2013. They worked with a European nonprofit that mailed an appeal to 50,208 people who had all given before. Each donor got one of nine reply coupons, built from their own last gift.
The researchers varied two things: whether the first (leftmost) amount was lower than, equal to, or higher than the donor’s previous gift, and how steeply the amounts climbed after that.
According to ESSEC’s summary of the research, the starting amount mattered far more than the steepness:
- Starting above the donor’s last gift made them less likely to give at all, but raised the average gift by about 10.9% among those who did.
- Starting below the donor’s last gift lowered the average gift by 7.3%.
- How steeply the amounts climbed after that first number had a much smaller effect.
Infrequent donors were a bit more sensitive. For people who had given only once, starting high reduced the likelihood of giving by 18.6%, compared with 16% for repeat donors.
Think about what that means for the generic $25, $50, $100 card. For a donor whose last gift was $100, your first suggestion is a quarter of what they already chose to give. For a donor whose last gift was $15, your first suggestion is higher than anything they’ve done before. One card manages to ask too little of one group and too much of the other.
Odd numbers and bigger jumps can cost you
A third study, by David Reiley and Anya Samek in Economic Inquiry (2019), tested suggested amounts with more than 10,000 members of a public television station. Two findings are worth knowing before you build your arrays.
First, changing one suggested amount from $100 to $95 reduced gifts of $90 or more by over 30%. Donors seem to prefer round numbers. Retail pricing tricks like $95 or $49.99 don’t belong on a reply card.
Second, raising every suggested amount by 20% to 40% reduced the likelihood of giving by about 15%, with little effect on the size of the average gift. In that test, asking for more across the board simply meant fewer donors.
One caution: these studies involved an opera house, a European charity, and a public TV station, all using mail. They don’t give you a universal formula. But they point in the same direction, and that direction is useful.
A simple way to set your year-end ask amounts
Here’s where I’d start. The principle is to anchor the first amount to what each donor has already given, keep the numbers round, and step up modestly from there.
1. Start with the donor’s most recent gift. Use it, rounded to a clean number, as the first amount. You’re not asking them to stretch on the first line. You’re confirming that their last decision was a good one and inviting them to repeat it.
2. Add two steps above it. Roughly 1.5 times and 2 times the first amount, rounded. You don’t need five or six options.
3. Always include an open “Other” line. Some donors will want to give less this year, and some will want to give more. Make both easy.
4. Use a separate approach for people with no giving history. For prospects and brand-new names, a fixed array based on your typical first gift is reasonable, because you have nothing to anchor to.
Imagine a literacy program sending its year-end letter to 900 past donors. Instead of one reply card, it prints three versions, based on each donor’s last gift:
| Last gift | Suggested amounts |
|---|---|
| $35 | $35, $50, $75, Other |
| $100 | $100, $150, $200, Other |
| $500 | $500, $750, $1,000, Other |
Many mail houses and donor databases can print a personalized ask on each reply card. If yours can’t, sort donors into three or four bands by last gift (for example, under $50, $50 to $249, and $250 and up) and print one card per band, with a first amount near the typical gift in that band (say $25, $75, and $250). That’s still a big improvement over a single card for everyone.
If you’re sending the appeal by mail, our complete guide to nonprofit direct mail covers the other pieces of the package.
When to adjust the formula
There are a few groups where I’d change the approach.
Donors who gave only once. The research suggests they’re the most likely to be scared off by a high first amount. Keep their first number at, not above, their last gift. Your goal with this group is a second gift, not a bigger one.
Your best donors. For donors giving $1,000 or more, a printed array is usually the wrong tool. A personal letter, a phone call, or a visit with a specific ask will do more than any reply card.
Monthly donors. A year-end letter with a one-time gift array may not be the right ask for them at all. We covered that question in Should You Ask Monthly Donors for a Year-End Gift?
Your donation page. The same logic applies online. If your year-end emails link to a form with default amounts, check whether those amounts make sense for the people clicking through. If your platform supports it, personalized links for different segments are worth setting up. Our post on donation page best practices has more on the form itself.
Test it if your list is big enough
If you mail several thousand donors, you have enough volume to run a simple test. Split your file randomly, send half your usual card and half the personalized arrays, and compare response rate, average gift, and total revenue per piece mailed. Look at all three numbers. A version that raises the average gift but loses a lot of donors may not be a win, especially if those lost donors were first-time givers you hoped to keep.
If your list is small, don’t worry about testing. The research gives you a reasonable default. Use it, then compare this year’s results to last year’s.
Where to start this week
Pull the reply card from last year’s year-end appeal. Write down the first amount. Then look up the median last gift of the donors who received it. If those two numbers are far apart, you’ve found your first fix.
Then think about who this letter is going to. Your year-end appeal starts with last December’s donors, and their last gift is the best clue you have about what to ask for next.
If you want a week-by-week structure for the rest of your year-end campaign, Finish Strong: The 90-Day Year-End Fundraising Plan is a workbook that walks you through planning and running it from October through December on a 13-week calendar. The worksheets stack into a complete year-end plan, with AI prompts throughout.
