The Most Powerful Change You Can Make in Writing Your Appeal Letter This Fall

06 Aug The Most Powerful Change You Can Make in Writing Your Appeal Letter This Fall

6 August 2024

By David Allen, Development for Conservation

I seem to collect books that I never find the time to read. I’m probably not alone in that. I have good intentions. Some are purchased, some are gifted. But all of the hold some significant level of interest for me. So, every once in a while, I look up at the current stack and think that I should probably take one down and start reading it.

And I’m usually glad I did. What took me so long?

Recently, one of those books was Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. In the book, Kahneman takes the reader on a tour of behavioral psychology and the experiments that have begun to shape our understanding of decision-making, judgement, and cognitive bias. It’s fascinating and daunting all at the same time.

The book is 400 pages and dense. I’ll need to read it several times before I could say I understood more than a small percentage of what’s there. After I’m done, I will probably put it right back on the shelf where it was and wait for another inspired moment to pull it down again.

I often get asked for evidence that supports the recommendations I make. And I am usually hard-pressed to produce it – not because it doesn’t exist, but because I don’t write for scientific journals, and I don’t retain bibliographic lists. In short, I simply can’t remember.

So, when I turned the page to 122 of Kahneman’s book and read about a study of anchoring effects in fundraising, I had a moment of elation. There it was! (And now you can find it, too.)

The way anchoring works in fundraising is that a number is planted in the donor’s mind against which the amount of money they end up giving becomes inevitably measured. This happens unconsciously.

You ask for a specific amount of money. The donor is obviously free to give more or less or to give nothing at all. But whatever they decide to give will be measured against the anchor.

Rather than paraphrasing, I will quote Kahneman directly, admittedly without permission, though certainly with attribution. Here’s the passage I read:

Some visitors at the San Francisco Exploratorium were told about the environmental damage caused by oil tankers in the Pacific Ocean and asked about their willingness to make an annual contribution “to save 50,000 offshore Pacific Coast seabirds from small offshore oil spills, until ways are found to prevent spills or require tanker owners to pay for the operation.”

This question requires intensity matching: the respondents are asked, in effect, to find a dollar amount of a contribution that matches the intensity of their feelings about the plight of the seabirds. Some of the visitors were first asked an anchoring question, such as, “Would you be willing to pay $5 …,” before the point-blank question of how much they would contribute.

When no anchor was mentioned, the visitors at the Exploratorium – generally an environmentally sensitive crowd – said they were willing to pay $64, on average. When the anchoring amount was only $5, contributions averaged $20. When the anchor was a rather extravagant $400, the willingness to pay rose to an average of $143.

The difference between the high-anchor and low-anchor groups was $123. The anchoring effect was above 30%.

That’s why I and other fundraising professionals always recommend asking for a specific amount of money – to use as an anchor. And doing so will help you raise more money.

Here are three very concrete applications of how this can affect your fundraising this Fall:

• Asking for a specific amount of money – providing an anchor – will ALWAYS help you raise more than not asking for a specific amount. The exception to this rule is when the anchor is actually less than what they gave last year (and that’s just silly). In Kahneman’s example, the $5 anchor was so much less than the average ($64), that it had an opposite effect.
• Asking for an ambitious anchor (even $400) will help increase what they decide to give over a lesser anchor. This would have limits, of course, but the limits might not be as low as you think. I wouldn’t recommend asking your general members for $10,000, but the results from asking for $400, $365, $250, and even $100 might surprise you.
• Consider your own anchors and the biases they create. Board directors who have been in place for 20-30 years might be uncomfortable asking for $100 in a letter – because their anchor was set 20-30 years ago using a much lower amount. In fact they might have tried asking for a specific amount in the past and had a bad experience. Maybe they asked for $25, and it diminished the return (from $64 in Kahneman’s example). But instead of inferring that they didn’t ask for enough, they inferred that NOT ASKING for a specific amount actually helped their returns. Hold your nose (and/or theirs) and override the objection anyway. You will raise more.

(And if you, or they, need encouragement, call me.)

The most powerful change you can make in writing your appeal letter this Fall?

Ask for money.

I’m interested in what you might try this year. Love to hear the stories – keep them coming.

Cheers, and Have a great week!

-da

PS: The book has a lot to say that is applicable to fundraising. I recommend reading it (and maybe more than once).

PPS: Your comments on these posts are welcomed and warmly requested. If you have not posted a comment before, or if you are using a new email address, please know that there may be a delay in seeing your posted comment. That’s my SPAM defense at work. I approve all comments as soon as I am able during the day.

Photo by Oskar-Młodziński courtesy of Pixaby.