The Art of Suggested Donation Amounts

How does the size of suggested donations affect charitable contributions?

That’s the question researchers from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business set out to answer in a recent study. Oleg Urminsky, associate professor of marketing, and Indranil Goswami, then a doctoral candidate at Booth and now an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Management, hoped to create a mathematical model to help nonprofits predict the most effective amount for suggested donations.

What they discovered is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for nonprofits—“no happy middle ground” between setting relatively high suggested donations and setting them lower that captures the benefits of both approaches, says Dr. Urminsky.