Two identical fundraising appeals went out from the same organization on the same day. One reached people scrolling on a phone. The other reached people sitting at a laptop. Nothing about the ask changed, not the amount, not the story, not the deadline. The laptop group gave at a rate eighteen percentage points higher than the phone group, and the reason has almost nothing to do with screens being harder to tap.

In three studies from researchers at UConn and Notre Dame, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, people were meaningfully less likely to donate on a smartphone than on a computer (Hock, Herd & Ferguson, 2024). In the first study, 52 percent of people working on a computer donated a small bonus to the Red Cross, compared with 34 percent of people on a smartphone, with the appeal itself held completely constant. A second study replicated the pattern using the Salvation Army as the recipient.

The researchers didn't stop at "phones make people stingier." They tested why, and found the effect was carried by self-focus. People using smartphones were measurably more focused on themselves and less focused on other people in that moment, and that attention shift explained most of the gap. It's a mechanism, not a mood. A 2019 PLOS ONE field experiment on construal level theory found that how psychologically close or distant something feels changes which messages actually move behavior, and that mismatched combinations of concrete and abstract framing can undercut each other (Antonides, 2019). A smartphone is a device people already use almost entirely for themselves, so at the exact moment a charity asks someone to think about a stranger, the object in their hand is quietly priming the opposite mental mode.

This reframes what the "mobile giving gap" actually is. It isn't friction. It isn't screen size. It's a construal problem: a donor whose attention is anchored on self is being asked, in that state, to feel for someone else.

Mirror neuron activity, the circuitry that lets a reader feel an echo of someone else's experience, depends on attention actually orienting toward that other person. If attention is already anchored on the self, primed by a device that exists almost entirely to serve the self, there is less of it left to spend orienting toward a stranger's story. The warm glow of giving works on the same logic. It's a reward response tied to feeling connected to a beneficiary, not simply to processing information about one. If self-focus is quietly holding attention, the warm glow circuit may never fully engage, not because the story was weak, but because attention never left the reader's own frame long enough to reach it.

This is not a "phones are bad" story, and it's worth being honest about that. The researchers' own fix wasn't shorter copy or a redesigned button. In a field test with a German humanitarian alliance responding to the war in Ukraine, changing "We provide emergency help for the Ukraine" to "The people suffering in Ukraine need help" raised click-through on smartphones enough to close the gap. Two sentences. No design changes. No added cost.

The fix worked by moving the grammatical subject of the sentence from the organization to the person in need, which is a cheaper and more precise lever than most of what fundraisers reach for when mobile numbers look soft.

Pull the version of your last appeal that most of your list actually opened, increasingly that's the mobile version. Read only the first sentence and ask one question: whose experience does it describe, yours or theirs? "We are responding to the crisis in..." centers the organization. "Families in... need..." centers the person.

Most organizations, when mobile numbers look weak, reach for the length lever: shorter subject lines, shorter paragraphs, fewer words. This research suggests a different, cheaper lever: grammatical subject, not word count. "The people suffering need help" is not shorter than "We provide help." It just puts someone else in the first noun position, and that's the variable that moved real donations in a live field test.

Retailers already treat mobile and desktop as different products with different flows. Most nonprofits still send the identical appeal to both. Before assuming your mobile conversion problem is a design or friction problem, it's worth testing whether it's actually a subject-of-the-sentence problem, because that's a one-line fix rather than a redesign.

Research Sources

In Lab Notes Pro

Lab Notes Pro this week breaks down a mobile-commerce impulse-buying study and why its lessons don't transfer to charitable asks the way they seem to, a preregistered trial on blocking mobile internet that isolates connectivity itself as the attention culprit, and older construal-level work on delay discounting that reframes how recurring gifts should be asked for differently than one-time mobile gifts. You'll also get the context-by-context breakdown across major gifts, digital, recurring, events, and peer-to-peer, three specific ways organizations misdiagnose their mobile numbers, a real-time account of what the donor is experiencing mid-scroll, and a runnable subject-line experiment you can build this week.