Can simple prompts increase bequest giving? Field evidence from a legal call centre

• We report a field study involving 2,664 callers to a legal call centre.
• We tested a weak ask prompting people to leave money to charity in their will.
• We also tested a strong ask with additional social/emotional factors.
• The strong ask had a significant effect relative to the weak ask.
• Most of the response was driven by people without children.

We report the findings of a field study demonstrating the importance of non-pecuniary mechanisms for bequest giving. We show that a prompt to leave money to charity that includes social/emotional factors made during the will-making process increases by 50 per cent the proportion of wills that include a charitable bequest. In terms of magnitude, we show that this is one-third of the effect of a 40% estates tax at the threshold. We find little response to either prompts or tax-price changes among people with children indicating that, for many, leaving money to their children appears to preclude leaving money to charity.