Rewrite One Appeal Around the Donor: Identity, Emotion, and Wellbeing

The highest-return edit you can make to a fundraising appeal is to change who it is about. Philanthropic psychology, the discipline built by Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant at the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, rewrites donor communications around the donor's identity, emotion, and wellbeing rather than the organization's need. The institute reports real-world income uplifts in excess of 100% from these rewrites across four years of experiments, a figure that is its own reported result. The peer-reviewed record behind the method stands on its own: identity language alone has lifted average gifts by about 10% in controlled field experiments.

What is philanthropic psychology?

It is the study of what giving does to the giver, applied to how organizations write. Shang was the first person to earn a PhD in philanthropy and describes her field as the psychology of the donor rather than the psychology of persuasion. The method reads every donor-facing sentence through three questions. Does this speak to who the donor is, their identity? Does it honor what the donor feels, their emotion? And does it leave the donor better off for having given, their wellbeing?

The frame is stewardship rather than extraction. On the First Day Podcast in September 2026, Sargeant described fundraising as stewarding the human capacity to love. An appeal written that way still asks, and still names a number and a deadline. What changes is the subject of the sentences: the donor's care becomes the story, and the organization becomes the instrument of it.

Why do feelings predict giving better than intentions?

Because donors report intentions they do not keep, and keep behaviors they never reported. In a longitudinal survey the institute ran across two charities, donors' stated intentions to keep giving did not predict whether they actually gave a year later. How giving left them feeling did predict it. The practical consequence is blunt: asking donors whether they plan to give again measures politeness, and measuring how the last gift made them feel measures the future.

The stakes are current. Overall donor retention sat at 43.3% in 2025 while the donor base shrank 3.6% for a fifth straight year (Fundraising Effectiveness Project). If the feeling a gift leaves behind is what brings a donor back, then appeal copy is retention work, done in advance, on the least expensive surface an organization owns.

What does a donor-centered rewrite change?

Three edits carry most of the effect. First, make the donor the grammatical subject of the sentences. "We provided 12,000 meals" becomes "You put 12,000 meals on neighbors' tables." Same fact, different actor. Second, name who the donor is, and tie the name to concrete prior behavior. Shang's public-radio experiments found that identity adjectives such as kind, generous, and caring lifted women's average gifts by about 10% (Stanford Social Innovation Review), and the labeling research Sargeant reviews adds that labels stick best when they rest on something the donor actually did. Third, show what giving did for the donor, not just for the beneficiary, because the feeling the gift leaves behind is the part that predicts the next one.