Toward an understanding of why suggestions work in charitable fundraising: Theory and evidence from a natural field experiment

•We build a model showing how amount suggestions can affect giving patterns.•A field experiment shows a strong effect of moving gifts to the suggestion amount.•The amount of subjects giving is increased by 50% by the treatment.•Results suggest subjects received utility from reaching an “appropriate” threshold.

People respond to those who ask. Within the charitable fundraising community, the power of the ask represents the backbone of most fundraising strategies. Despite this, the optimal design of communication strategies has received less formal attention. For their part, economists have recently explored how communication affects empathy, altruism, and giving rates to charities. Our study takes a step back from this literature to examine how suggestions–a direct ask for a certain amount of money–affect giving rates. We find that our suggestion amounts affect both the intensive and extensive margins: more people give and they tend to give the suggested amount. The resulting insights help us understand why people give, why messages work, and deepen practitioners' understanding of how to use messages to leverage more giving.