Honey.Bunny and the Case for Matching Message to Person
Imagine getting an email from honey.bunny77@hotmail.de.
What would you immediately infer about this person? Ok, spam and X-rated content but after that you might infer age, maybe gender, maybe a certain playfulness or lack of seriousness. You formed a view about competence and credibility from a string of characters.
That instinct is not random.
Researchers did a study asking strangers to judge a person’s personality based on nothing but an email address. They also measured the personality of the email address owners directly. Two outcomes from this study,
- Strangers tended to agree with each other about the personality behind the email address
- And the strangers were correct, showing statistically significant correlation with the owner’s measured, true personality.
Granted, the effects were modest, nobody is reconstructing a full psyche from “honey.bunny77” but the signal was real. Even thin digital traces carry psychologically meaningful information.
Now look at me. No, seriously, take a look.
On my LinkedIn profile, there is a third party sales app that analyzes my public footprint and produces a Big Five Personality (OCEAN) profile. It then gives prescriptive advice on how to email me, how long the message should be, how direct the ask should be, what tone to use.
What you do not see in the screenshot is the obvious implication. If a sales team can estimate my personality from language patterns and behavioral residue, then every piece of communication I send is also signaling mine.
Every appeal has a personality but most organizations have never measured it.
That realization is what led us to build our own tool. We wanted to move beyond “voice” as a creative abstraction and treat it as something quantifiable. If strangers can infer traits from an email address, and if companies can infer traits from LinkedIn language, then fundraising copy and it’s authors can be profiled too.
This isn’t to label the writer, but to profile the signal the message is sending. From there, you can compare the personality of the appeal to the personality distribution of your audience.
Message misalignment isn’t theoretical, it happens with every appeal you send unless you are matching that appeal to the person. And the consequence of mismatch is lower response and lifetime value. Fortunately, it’s very fixable.
The honey.bunny email study shows that personality leaks through even the smallest digital cracks. The LinkedIn app shows that markets will invest heavily to operationalize that leakage. The open question for fundraising is simpler. If personality is visible in language and predictive of response, why are we still pretending one voice fits everyone?
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
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