How to Ask for Donations: Name the Use, the Amount, and the Person

The clearest way to ask for donations is to name three things: what the gift will do, how much you are asking for, and who is asking. The evidence for the first part is direct. In Bloomerang's 2026 Giving Signals Report, a survey Bloomerang commissioned from The Harris Poll of more than 1,000 active U.S. donors in March 2026, "94% of donors say they're motivated to give when an organization tells them exactly where their money will go." The evidence for the third part comes from Chapman, Spence, Hornsey and Dixon's 2025 meta-analysis of 40 years of research, which found that identifying with the person asking is associated with giving more. The amount is practical advice rather than a finding of either study: a specific sum, priced at the real cost of the use, lets the donor see what their gift will accomplish.

Why should an ask name what the gift will do?

A donor deciding whether to give is weighing a cost they can see, the money, against a benefit they cannot see, the good it does. Naming the use of the gift makes the benefit visible. "Support our programs" asks the donor to trust that something good will happen. "Your gift pays for a semester of workbooks for one adult learner" tells them what will happen. The Bloomerang survey found that nearly every active donor it asked says the second kind of message motivates them.

Hold the 94% figure for what it is. The survey measures what donors say motivates them, not what they later did, and it sampled active donors, people already giving. A stated preference that strong is still a useful guide to writing, because it costs nothing to honor. The practical test is whether a reader could repeat back, in one sentence, what their gift buys. If they could not, the ask is too vague.

Why should an ask name a specific amount?

An ask without an amount hands the donor a second decision on top of the first. They must decide to give and then decide how much, usually by guessing what is normal. Naming an amount, and tying it to the use, answers both questions at once: $75 pays for a semester of workbooks. Research on how the size of a suggested amount changes gifts is covered in our guides to ask-amount anchoring and social proof in ask amounts. The point here is simpler, and it is practical advice rather than a tested finding: an amount makes the use concrete, and a concrete use is what donors in the Bloomerang survey said motivates them.

A specific, reasonable amount is also in step with how donors are giving now. The Virtuous 2026 benchmark report, covering 771 mid-sized and large U.S. nonprofits, found that the median gift, meaning the middle gift when all gifts are lined up by size, "increased approximately 20%" in 2025. That finding does not show that asking for more causes larger gifts. It only shows the direction gift sizes moved at those organizations.

Why does it matter who is asking?

The strongest evidence on the person comes from a meta-analysis, a study that pools the results of many earlier studies. Cassandra Chapman, Jessica Spence, Matthew Hornsey, and Lucas Dixon, writing in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly in 2025, combined 109 effect sizes from 89,570 participants across 40 years of research on social identification, meaning how strongly a person feels they belong to the same group as someone else. They measured the link to giving with a correlation coefficient, r, which runs from -1 to 1, where 0 means no relationship and 1 a perfect positive one. The pooled studies mix surveys of self-reported giving with studies that measured actual gifts. Across all studies the link was r = .29, which the authors describe as medium-sized.

The link was largest for one relationship in particular. Identifying with the fundraiser, the person asking, was associated with giving at r = .36, against r = .24 for identifying with the beneficiaries and r = .23 for identifying with other donors. The authors also found that how strongly a person identified mattered more (r = .32) than simply sharing a group label (r = .15). In plain terms, donors give more when the asker is someone they feel connected to, and a real, named person is far easier to feel connected to than an organization's logo.

Two caveats from the same paper keep the finding honest. First, the effects were smaller for measured giving behavior (r = .20) than for self-reported giving (r = .33), so what people do moves less than what they say. Second, identification predicted giving when the gift went through a charity (r = .34) but not when people gave directly to an individual (r = .04). That second result concerns the kind of giving organizations ask for, gifts made through a charity. And because correlations measure association rather than cause, the finding supports choosing a relatable asker without promising a set lift.

A named asker matters most for the gift that is hardest to get, the second one. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that only 18.9% of donors who were new in 2024 gave again in 2025, across 15,102 organizations, against 59.3% of repeat donors. The Virtuous 2026 report put first-to-second gift conversion at 25.84% across its 771 mid-sized and large organizations, meaning three of four first-time donors did not give again. Those rates describe what happens after a first gift, not the effect of any ask, but they show how much rides on the next one.