Psychology behind donations

[Bruno]

Does anyone here have any idea of the psychological process when someone is considering a donation? Relevant results from research?

As odd as it sounds, I am thinking about the strategical decision to constrain the size of a single donation. Instead of "donate" or "make a donation", I want to say "donate a dollar" or something in that vein. Once a person decides to "donate a dollar", I'll offer three options:

How many dollars would you like to donate?
> 1
> 2
> 5

The purpose is to lower the psychological barrier of making a donation,for people who are willing to donate but are unsure about how much they are "expected" to donate. My intuition says that setting a low expectation may comfort the donator and could possible increase the pull to donate. As a result, this should increase the average number of donations per month.

The downside is that you are garanteed to be missing big donations. If for example Donald Trump goes broke again, he may want to seek advice on this forum and donate Steve Pavlina $1,000,000 afterwards.
Adding the option "more...", or replacing the option "5" with "more..." will keep the door open for these rare occasions, but how will it influence the behaviour of potential donators?

Does anyone have experience with or related thoughts about this?

[Bruno]

I was just looking around on wikipedia and saw that they actually publish the (live) list of donations and the accumulated value. Donators can also choose to stay anonymous.

It's quite amusing. So far I have seen the donations that were made yesterday. They vary between $0.01 and $1000. I am bound to run some statistics on this data.

[jpfieber]

Your post got me to thinking. I've added a donation button to the end of all the posts on my site (ITsVISTA), preceded by the lines:

• What's Your Time Worth?
• Have I Saved You Time?
• Consider Donating $1

The button links to a PayPal donation page where no amount is pre-filled in. The site is relatively new, and I hadn't asked for donations before, so I won't be able to tell if this works better than a 'blind' donation, but your point makes sense to me, I think I'd be more likely to donate if I felt only a dollar was expected of me. I'll try to remember to post back if I see any results. Thanks for the idea!