Greedy or Grateful? - Asking for More when Thanking Donors

Sep 16, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya

Charities send thank-you letters and small gifts to express gratitude, yet they often add further donation asks and/or engagement. This strategy can create donor reactance when gratitude signals persuasive intent, altering giving behavior. The paper tests how this reactance depends on donor loyalty using a large-scale natural field experiment with nearly 180,000 past donors in India. Results support targeting additional asks to non-loyal donors only, increasing total donations by 12.8%–17.5% while highlighting limits of cross-sectional evidence.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages47

Reading Time16 min

AccessFree to download

INTRODUCTION

Donor relationship management and gratitude

Reciprocity, token gifts, and fundraising effects

The tradeoff: asking for more vs eliciting gratitude

GREEDY OR GRATEFUL? ASKING FOR MORE WHEN THANKING DONORS By K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong, and Subroto Roy June 2019 Revised March2021 COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 2183R COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS YALE UNIVERSITY Box 208281 New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8281 [http://cowles.yale.edu/](http://cowles.yale.edu/) Greedy or Grateful? Asking for More when Thanking Donors K. Sudhir, Hortense Fong Yale School of Management Subroto Roy University of New Haven March 2021 We thank HelpAge India for its support for the project. The authors thank Nathan Novemsky, Taly Reich, Karen Winterich, Guy Voichek, and Minju Han for helpful discussions and comments, and participants atthe Yale SOM Quantitative Marketing Lunch Workshop for comments and feedback. 1 Greedy or Grateful? Asking for More when Thanking Donors Charities routinely send “thank you letters” and small gifts to express gratitude to donors but seek to defray these costs by making additional asks for donations and/or engagement. But the“ask for more” can backﬁre if potential donors perceive persuasive intent in the expression of gratitude, inducing reactance. We hypothesize that such reactance and its impact on giving will vary by donor loyalty. Loyal donors are more likely to experience reactance to additional asks, muting the feeling of reciprocity aroused by the expression of gratitude to suppress giving. In contrast, non-loyal donors are less likely to experience reactance, and therefore more likely to channel the feeling of reciprocity toward giving. We test our hypothesis using a large-scale natural ﬁeld experiment involving nearly 180,000 past donors to a leading charity in India. We ﬁnd evidence in support of our hypothesis. We therefore recommend that additional asks only be made to nonloyal donors. Such differentially targeted ask messages based on past donation behavior, using data readily available to charities, can increase overall donation amounts by 12.8-17.5% . Our ﬁndings highlight that purely cross-sectional experiments that do not account for past donor/customer history may offer incomplete insight and lead to erroneous managerial implications. Keywords: gratitude, ﬁeld experiments, reactance, fundraising, donor relationship management, nonproﬁts JEL Codes: L31, M31, M37, C93 2 INTRODUCTION As nonproﬁts increasingly depend on private individual giving, in particular small donations from a large donor base, 1 the use of marketing and persuasion techniques for fundraising is gaining in importance. Traditional marketing concepts like customer relationship management (CRM) can help nonproﬁts in their donor relationship management (DRM) efforts. Just as CRM encourages ongoing customer engagement to enhance customer retention, cross-sell, and up-sell, DRM encourages ongoing donor engagement with the goal of generating regular donations of increasing magnitude (Sargeant 2008, Netzer et al. 2008) . The motivation to engage with existing customers/donors is similar for both for-proﬁt and nonproﬁt organizations: it is more cost-effective to keep an existing customer/donor than to attract a new one (Sargeant 2001) . A common practice for managing and growing donor relationships is to express gratitude to donors for their past support using “thank you” letters (Bennett 2006, Merchant et al. 2010) . Thankyou letters may sometimes also be accompanied by a token gift. It is well-understood that expressions of gratitude and token gifts generate reciprocity (Falk 2007, Grant and Gino 2010, Raggio and Folse 2011, Eckel et al. 2016) . In the context of fundraising, the expression of gratitude can therefore lead to further donations (Merchant et al. 2010) . Thus, even though thank you and gift campaigns are expensive, nonproﬁts ﬁnd them effective tools for donor relationship management because the additional funds raised not only defray the costs of the gratitude campaign, but even augment fundraising. For e

FAQs

Why might asking for more in thank-you letters backfire for charities?

It can trigger donor reactance if donors interpret gratitude as persuasive intent, which may suppress giving despite reciprocity cues.

How does donor loyalty affect the impact of additional asks?

Loyal donors are more likely to experience reactance to extra asks, muting reciprocity’s effect, while non-loyal donors are less likely to react and more likely to translate reciprocity into donations.

What do the experiment results suggest charities should do?

Additional asks should be directed only to non-loyal donors, using past donation behavior data to tailor messages and increase overall donations.

Sep 16, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya