Don’t Ask … Don’t Get

But Hines says it’s worth the risk and the effort.

“There’s just a general reluctance to ask for a second gift or to ask people for more money than what they had been giving,” says Hines, who counsels many of her clients to run membership-upgrade campaigns, often asking current members to at least double their gifts. “What we’ve found is that, time after time, these upgrade campaigns work very well, to the point of that’s the proof we need that people aren’t asked often enough to go ahead and respond by giving more.