The role of odd and even numbers in fundraising

Howard Lake | 14 May 2014 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Major gift
• Research and statistics

Fundraising is made up of odd and even numbers of course. But how many people give you £11 rather than £10? And why is it that way? More importantly, what can we as fundraisers do with that information?

@howardlake Can’t call it “research” but I generally use odd numbers to prompt an ask, and to price a `gift` seems to work ok, and
— David Baker (@bakehousetheman) May 6, 2014

@howardlake certainly outperforms the usual £5 £10 £25 prompts…
— David Baker (@bakehousetheman) May 6, 2014

Dr Beth Breeze comments on the rounded donations she encountered amongst major donors.

“In the first Million Pound Donor report, I wrote about the prevalence of rounded donations  (esp for exactly £1million) and the potential existence of a ‘million pound ceiling’. In that first report one in five donations (19%) were for exactly £1 million and 41% were for a rounded figure!

“The preponderance of donations for £1 million as opposed to £990,000 or £1.2 million is even more curious in an era when donors supposedly respond to figures about what exactly the charity needs – how likely is it that every great project costs exactly the rounded sum of £1 million (or £2 million, £5 milllion or £10 million, which also appear frequently).

“I think there’s a few answers. One is that people give what they are asked to give – so despite the whole metrics/impact talk, fundraisers still aim for a target of £10 million or whatever, rather than a costed non-rounded number that is the real cost of their project.

“I also think that there’s something about giving ‘a million’ that ticks boxes (for the giver and the receiver): £1,000,000 is simply the figure that means ‘a serious giver’ or ‘top league donor’ – all the social and psychological benefits seem to kick in at that stage, what more would you get from a charity, or is a knighthood any more likely if you give £1.1 million rather than £1 million?“

The section on this is on p.5-6 of this report:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/philanthropy/documents/Coutts%20Million%20Pound%20Donors%20Report.pdf

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.