The University of Cambridge has a demo app predicting your personality on the Big Five based on word usage vis-a-vis your social media accounts.

It’s quite accurate on seemingly very little data – I only linked to my infrequently used and only in a professional capacity, Twitter account.  You’d think that’d be a biased sample for predicting my personality if ever there was one.

But, since DonorVoice uses Personality as a basis for fundraising strategy and segmentation it’s almost a workplace requirement that I’ve taken the full battery, direct-measure, Big-Five Personality assessment so I used those results as point of comparison.

Why does any of this matter?   To quote our good friend and former Agitator editor, Nick Ellinger, “if they can tell your personality from your writing, what makes you think that personality doesn’t matter when you are being written to?”

Human language reflects personality.  Guess which one came first?  The “101” in cause and effect tells us the only way one thing can cause another is if it precedes it.  Your personality came before your Twitter account (though  social media trolls may be the exception…)

Your personality shows how you generally engage with the world.  Choices you make, behaviors you do and don’t take, what you read, ignore or get excited by is heavily influenced by how well it matches your disposition.

Your donors don’t have a single Personality model.  We segment them based on the most dominant traits  -e.g. their two highest scores of the five.

A lot of donors exist on your file who are high in Openness and Low in Conscientiousness.  These folks are quirky and unconventional (among other things).   You also have a sizeable segment of donors who are High in Agreeableness and High in Openness.  These people are idealistic,  diplomatic and genial.

Sending the same appeal with the same language to these two groups is to assume Lady Gaga and Barack Obama are the same.

The beauty is that like the University of Cambridge (you’ve waited patiently, here is the demo app), we as fundraisers don’t need every donor on the house file donors or prospect lists to take the 100 item personality test.  We take a sample based survey of the house file (with an abbreviated, 15 item survey), run a bit of analysis and find an organization’s high proportion, Personality profiles.

We then use what we generally know about those profiles to find these folks (using 2nd or 3rd party data) use words appropriate for this particular profile to make a tailored connection in our communications.

People are very different –but different in very predictable ways.  Time to start segmenting and marketing on what drives behavior rather than what’s convenient or adhering blindly to the way it has always been done.

Kevin