Practical guidance on making a request specific enough to move a donor to act, drawn from the research on tangibility and choice.
Be specific, not general. "Winter coats for kids ages 5 to 12" moves people. "Clothing donations" doesn't. Controlled experiments on tangibility found that adding concrete detail about how a gift is used raised giving by roughly 80% (Cryder, Loewenstein & Scheines, 2013). Specificity isn't a style choice, it's the mechanism.
Tie it to a program, not just an item. "A diaper for a family in our emergency shelter program" gives a donor more to hold onto than "diapers." You don't need to name an individual, just the program the item supports.
Give donors a real choice. A single ask underperforms a short list of specific options. In a field experiment with nearly 41,000 donors, letting people choose the specific project or item they were funding lifted donation likelihood by 14% and revenue by 27% (Esterzon et al., Journal of Marketing, 2023). Three to ten live items beats one.
Keep the list alive. A list with needs from six months ago reads as inactive, even if your programs are running fine. Update it as items get fulfilled or needs change. This is the one ongoing thing that keeps a wishlist working.
Say exactly where it goes, and leave overhead out of it. Donors are measurably reluctant to fund anything beyond the direct cost of the thing itself (Gneezy, Keenan & Gneezy, Science 2014). A wishlist item is already the most direct answer to that. Don't dilute it by bundling it into a general "support our mission" ask.
Mix price points. Not everyone can fund an $85 item. A list with a $12 option next to it lets more donors say yes today.
None of this replaces judgment about your own programs. But across the research, the pattern holds: specific, tied to something real, and framed as a genuine choice.