How to calculate the right ask amount for each donor

Most appeal reply forms are built from one number. The database is asked for each donor's last gift, and the three boxes on the form are set from it: the last gift, something like one and a half times it, and double. The mail house prints them, the donation page pre-fills them, and every supporter on the list is asked to take the same step up.

The database holds a lot more than that one number. For most donors it has years of gifts with dates attached, and those dates show which way each person's giving is moving. Teams that read only the last gift tend to segment by the size of the last gift, which is barely segmentation at all, and they set asks the same way. The right ask follows the direction of each donor's giving, which means a donor who is slowing down should be asked for no more than they usually give, and the form should open there.

Two donors who each gave $100 last time

One supporter gave $50 in March 2025, $75 that October and $100 in February 2026. Her gifts are getting larger and arriving closer together, and an ask of $115 continues a direction she set herself.

Another supporter also gave $100 last time. Before that she gave $150 two or three times a year, and her last gift was eleven months ago, so her gifts are getting smaller and further apart. A form that opens at $115 asks her to reverse two years of drift in a single reply. The standard three boxes of $100, $150 and $200 treat her smallest recent gift as the floor.

On the one field the last-gift rule reads, these two donors are identical, and they get the same form. The second donor's right ask is the smaller of her last gift and her usual gift, which here is $100, with nothing on the form that asks her to climb.

The lowest amount on the form decides whether a slowing donor gives

The instinct to ask everyone up has something behind it. Donors who are asked for more do sometimes give more, and a program that never asks up leaves money with its most generous supporters. What that instinct misses is the cost of an over-ask to a donor who is already wavering.

In a large field experiment with a charity's existing donors, Arnaud De Bruyn and Sonja Prokopec found that the lowest amount on the ask scale had the strongest influence on whether people gave at all. The lower it sat, the more likely a donor was to give, and the effect was stronger among infrequent donors than frequent ones. Their conclusion was that a charity can use what it already knows about each donor's past giving to set the amounts it shows them.

For the slowing donor, then, the first box carries most of the decision. If it opens above anything she has given in the past year, the likely result is no reply at all, and a team reading that silence as a lapse may well send her a win-back letter the following year.

The lapsed donor who used to give $2,500

Lapsed donors are where the one-number habit fails in the other direction. Reactivation asks are usually set low on purpose, to lower the bar to coming back. What decides whether that works is what "low" is measured against.

A common shortcut is a typical figure for the whole lapsed group, such as its median gift, with a discount applied. A median is set by a group's most numerous members, and in most donor files those are small givers. Worked out across gifts rather than across donors, the median drops further again, because a former $10-a-month donor adds twelve gifts a year to the calculation and a former $2,500-a-year donor adds one.

Picture a program where that figure lands at $30. Three-quarters of it asks everyone in the lapsed group for about $25, including the supporter who gave $2,500 a year until two years ago. She can clear that bar without thinking, and it also tells her the organisation has forgotten who she was. Priced from her own history, three-quarters of her $2,500 average rounds to a $2,000 ask, which is still a step down and still recognisably her. When that ask should go out is a separate question, and the answer is usually sooner than a twelve-month lapse rule allows.

How Together sets a suggested ask

Together calculates a suggested ask for every scored donor from that donor's own confirmed gifts, so a pending or failed payment never moves the number. The rule it applies depends on where the donor sits in the RFM segments, and on an upgrade signal built from recent behaviour such as gifts getting larger or arriving closer together:

• A Champion or Loyal donor with a strong upgrade signal is asked for 15 per cent more than their last gift, and never less than the typical gift for their segment. Without the signal, the ask matches their last gift.
• A Potential Loyalist or Promising donor is asked for 10 per cent more than their last gift.
• A new donor is asked to match their first gift, which builds the habit before stretching it.
• A donor in Needs Attention, About to Lapse or At Risk is asked for the smaller of their last gift and their own average.
• A Lapsed or Lost High Value donor is asked for three-quarters of their own average gift.

Each amount is rounded to one a person would pick on a form, in $5 steps for smaller donors and at familiar figures like $250, $500 and $1,000 further up, with a floor of $5. On the Donor Scores page, each suggested ask opens to a one-sentence reason and the donor's last and average gift, so a fundraiser who disagrees with a number can see exactly what they are disagreeing with. The asks are recalculated each day alongside the scores.

The rules are plain on purpose, and they have limits. A donor with a single gift has no direction yet, so any ask for them is a guess about the second gift rather than a reading of a trend. A donor saving up for one large gift looks the same in the data as a donor drifting away, right up until the gift arrives, and a fundraiser who knows the difference should trust that knowledge over the number.

Finding the slowing donors before the next appeal

This can be tried without any new software. For donors with at least three gifts, a spreadsheet can compare each donor's last gift with the average of the gifts before it, and the time since their last gift with their usual gap between gifts. The donors whose last gift sits below their average and whose silence is running long are the ones whose next form should open at the smaller of the two figures. It is often a short list, and it is worth pulling before the next appeal file goes to the mail house.