Donor survey questions, and what asking them changes
A 12-question donor survey for a charity, a conservation group or an arts organisation, ending on the one item whose wording has a measured effect on what a donor does next. Answer it here first, then send your own.
- 12questions
- about 3 minto complete
- Anonymousno name, no email address
- Question 12asks for a prediction
A donor survey is itself an ask
The person opening it knows a fundraiser sent it. That decides how the last question is worded, and when the survey goes out.
Most giving follows an ask. A review of more than 500 studies puts solicitation among the eight forces behind charitable giving, and reports that 85 per cent of donation acts in one national survey followed a solicitation.[2] A survey from your fundraising team is read against that background.
Asking about a behaviour moves the behaviour. A meta-analysis of 116 published tests found a small positive effect of intention and prediction questions on what people then did: d+ = 0.24 pooled, and 0.19 across the 32 prosocial tests.[1] It is pooled across health, consumer and prosocial behaviour, so it is not a fundraising number. It does mean the survey is a light intervention as well as a measurement.
Which makes the wording of the last question a real choice. In the same analysis, questions asking people to predict what they would do carried a larger effect than questions asking what they intended: 0.29 across 85 tests against 0.12 across 15, with the intention interval crossing zero.[1] Question 12 therefore asks how likely a donor thinks it is that they will give again, not whether they intend to.
Timing works the same way. Longer gaps between the question and the behaviour went with smaller effects,[1] so send it in the weeks before an appeal rather than months in front of one.
The 12 donor survey questions
Every question, its answer format, and what a weak answer looks like. Copy one block or all 12.
Where the gift came from
Asked first, so every later answer can be read by tenure and by channel.
- How long have you been giving to us?The first option is the split that matters: it separates a first gift from a fifth before you read questions 10 and 11.
- What prompted your most recent gift?A pile on one channel tells you which ask did the work. The last two options are there so nobody has to invent an answer.
What the gift did
Efficacy is one of the eight mechanisms behind charitable giving,[2] asked from the donor's side rather than from your annual report.
- I can see what my donation paid for.Read it against question 4, never on its own. High trust with low visibility is a different problem from the reverse, and the fix is different too.
- How much do you trust us to spend your donation well?The single item worth tracking unchanged year on year. Everything else on this page can be reworded; this one should not be.
- What would you most like us to tell you about?The last option is a real answer, not a shrug. Somebody choosing it is telling you the cadence already suits them.
How you ask
Asked directly, rather than inferred from a giving record this survey cannot see.
- How would you rather hear from us?Replace these with the channels you actually run, and keep the last one: a supporter who wants quiet between gifts has nowhere else to say so.
- How often would you like to hear from us?Set the answers against what you actually send. Raising the number of solicitations can produce donor fatigue and lower the average contribution.[2]
- The amount we ask for feels about right for me.The item that decides whether a low score at question 12 is about the amount or about the cause.
- How easy was it to make your last gift?A low score here belongs to your donation form, not to your case for support, which makes it the cheapest of the twelve to act on.
In their words
Both optional and both before the close, so nobody is held up by a blank box.
- What is the main reason you give to us rather than somewhere else?Sort these by the answer to question 1 before you count them. The reasons a new donor gives are not the reasons a long-standing one gives.
- What would make you stop giving to us?Read these beside question 4. A low trust score with nothing written here is worth a phone call rather than another email.
Giving again
A prediction rather than an intention, and last because everything in front of it is about what already happened.
- How likely do you think it is that you will give to us again in the next 12 months?Asking this moves the behaviour it asks about, by a small amount, so read it as a ranking of groups rather than as a forecast of income.[1]
Three swaps before you send. Put your own channels into question 6, name the programme in question 5 if you run more than one, and cut question 7 if you only take gifts once a year. There is no gift-size question: a band would have to be self-reported, and a donor may decline it.
Reading answers to a survey that is also an ask
There is no score here. Twelve questions produce counts, and three of them mean something only read together.
Start with questions 3, 4 and 8: whether a donor can see what their gift paid for, whether they trust you to spend it well, and whether the amount feels right. The table is the short version.
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| High trust at question 4, low agreement at question 3 | They believe in you and cannot say what their money did. | One specific example in the next letter, not another impact report. |
| Low trust at question 4, high agreement at question 3 | They can see the spending and do not like what they see. | This is not a communication problem. Read question 11 before you write anything. |
| Question 8 sits low across every group | The amount you ask for does not match what this list can give. | Change the ask before you change the frequency. Question 7 says whether the frequency is wrong too. |
| Question 7 fills up on "only when I choose to give" | Your contact schedule is doing work nobody asked for. | Cut a send. Raising the number of solicitations can produce donor fatigue and lower the average contribution.[2] |
Question 12 is not a forecast. Because asking moves the behaviour it asks about,[1] the answers are not an estimate of what would have happened without the survey. Read it as a ranking: which groups sit lowest, and which sit low here and at question 4 together. Do not multiply it by an average gift, and do not call it an NPS.
Split the open boxes by first gift. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts the sector's weak point at the first-to-second gift rather than at retention overall,[3] and question 1 separates the two groups afterwards. If you send two links instead of one, first-time donors get their own.
Before cutting the results any finer, check how many replies each group holds: sample size for surveys covers the arithmetic. If you are judging the work the money paid for rather than the giving, the program evaluation questions ask the people a programme served.
Before you send it to donors
Three things to settle, and the note to put in front of people.
Nothing here joins up to a giving record. Nobody can look up what a respondent gave, so the answers are genuinely anonymous, which matters when question 4 asks whether they trust you with their money. Whoever owns the survey can still open every response, so name that person in the invitation. You pick the segment by picking who gets the link: one to monthly givers, another to people who gave once.
Say why you are asking. Imagine Canada's donor survey guidance puts it in a line: more people will answer if you tell them why you are asking.[4] The invitation below does that, and says this is not an appeal.
If the people you are asking pay dues rather than give gifts, the member survey asks about renewal instead. After a gala or a sponsored run, the event feedback questions and this survey answer different things, about a week apart.
All 12 questions are already loaded in the free form builder, so the only editing left is your channels and programme names.
Do not ask what you will not answer. Question 11 invites somebody to say what would make them stop giving, and if nothing visible follows, the next survey is the one nobody fills in.
What to put in front of people before question one
Before you start This survey asks how our fundraising feels from your side: what prompted your last gift, whether you can see what it paid for, and how often you want to hear from us. We are asking because [ORGANISATION] is planning next year's appeals, and we would rather write them around what supporters tell us than around what we assume. This is not an appeal. There is nothing to give here. We do not ask for your name or your email address, and there is no way to match an answer to a donation record. [NAME] is the person who reads the replies, and every answer is reported as a total. Twelve questions, about three minutes. It closes on [DATE], and we will say what we heard and what we changed by [DATE].
Donor survey FAQ
What questions should you ask in a donor survey?
Five things: where the gift came from, whether the donor can see what it paid for, whether they trust you to spend it well, how they want to be asked, and whether they expect to give again. The last is worded as a prediction rather than an intention, because the two did not carry the same effect on behaviour.[1]
How many questions should a donor survey have, and how long should it take?
Twelve, about three minutes. Lists of thirty, fifty and sixty donor questions are menus to pick from, and sending one of them whole is not what it is for.
When should you send a donor survey?
In the weeks before the appeal it is meant to shape, not months in front of it. Once a year suits a small supporter list, at the same point each year so the answers compare.
Should a donor survey be anonymous?
This one is: no name, no email address, and no giving record on the link, which matters when question 4 asks whether a donor trusts you with their money. Whoever owns it can still open every response, so name that person in the invitation.
Does asking donors about giving again change what they give?
Yes, by a small amount, across 116 pooled tests of intention and prediction questions.[1] That does not mean you should survey in order to raise money. It means question 12 is not a clean measurement of what would have happened anyway, and must not be multiplied by an average gift.
Giving is one thread in a congregation and not the whole of it. When you want to read attendance, welcome and volunteering alongside it, the congregation survey covers the wider relationship and leaves the amounts to this page.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
No published donor instrument was reproduced. The design is two questions about where the gift came from, three about what the donor believes it did, four about how they want to be asked, two open boxes and one closing item. The prediction wording of question 12, and its position at the end, follow the subgroup analysis in the meta-analysis of the question-behaviour effect, where prediction and intention wordings did not carry the same effect.[1]
Question licensing
The Motives to Donate Scale (Konrath and Handy, 2018) is published under restricted access with no Creative Commons licence and a permissions request form, so no item from it appears here; author copies circulating on repository sites are not a licence. Imagine Canada's Donor Survey Lookbook is ungated but carries no copyright line, licence or rights statement anywhere in the document, so it is described, cited and quoted for one line of design opinion, and no question is taken from it.[4]
Limits and disclosure
The effect sizes here are pooled across health, consumer and prosocial behaviour, and the prosocial estimate rests on 32 tests, none of them a donor survey run by a charity.[1] The 85 per cent figure comes from one national survey as reported in a literature review, not from a source this page opened itself.[2] Donor retention percentages published by the sector cover different windows and are swapped for each other routinely, so none is quoted here at all; only the qualitative finding about first-to-second gifts is used.[3] The survey carries no score. It produces counts, and there is nothing to add up.
SuperSurvey builds the editor this template opens in. Nothing here depends on using it.
References
- Wood, C., Conner, M., Miles, E., Sandberg, T., Taylor, N., Godin, G. and Sheeran, P. "The Impact of Asking Intention or Self-Prediction Questions on Subsequent Behavior: A Meta-Analysis." Personality and Social Psychology Review 20, no. 3 (2016): 245-268. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (CC BY 3.0)
- Bekkers, R. and Wiepking, P. "A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving." Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 40, no. 5 (2011): 924-973. doi.org
- AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday. Fundraising Effectiveness Project: Q1 2026 Report, 29 July 2026. afpglobal.org
- Imagine Canada. Donor Survey Lookbook. Imagine Canada, 2021. imaginecanada.ca
Send the donor survey, and know what the last question does
Twelve questions, about three minutes, and a last item worded as a prediction rather than an intention. Put your programme names in and send it.
Use this template