Great Tip from Mal Warwick's Site October 23, 2005

Mal Warwick advises Mission Research and has allowed us to pull articles from his archives and publish them here for you. Here's a good one:

Q: In what order should ask amounts be listed?
I recently got a piece in my own mail from the Salvation Army, and the string was as follows:

[ ] $65      [ ]$55      [ ]$100        [ ]other

Why do you think the amounts were listed in this order? — Diana Lee, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, Oakland, California

What is the best way to order your donation ask amounts on a reply form — lowest to highest, or highest to lowest? For example, should a reply form gift amounts read "$25 $50 $100 Other", or "$100 $50 $25 Other"? — Michelle Pilatzke, World Wildlife Fund Canada, Toronto, Ontario

Mal answers:  There's no "best" way to do this. Like just about every other detail in direct mail fundraising, this matter is testable. There are some practitioners who hold that the gift string should be ascending in donor or member acquisition mailings and descending in house file mailings. Presumably, they tested this question and found those arrangements advantageous.

A big mailer like the Salvation Army probably tests this sort of thing regularly. Either this is one of those tests, or previous tests have determined that it produces better results. Irregular sequences like this occasionally work well. All I can say, though, is that it's wise to test when in doubt.