Two years ago, in Part 1, we talked about how Alfred Hitchcock held our rapt attention by having a separate script for the emotional arc of his movies.  There’s another Hitchcock idea we can steal to raise more: the MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin is the object around which a story revolves, but no one in the audience cares what the object is.  Rather, we are interested in the story about the object and the drama in its pursuit.  Some of the most popular movies of all time were, in theory, about the pursuit of a storied item that, in practice, just gave people a thing to pursue:

• Letters of transit (Casablanca)
• What Rosebud means (Citizen Kane)
• A necklace (Titanic)
• A briefcase (Pulp Fiction, Ronin)
• The secret plans or a secret list (multiple Star Wars, multiple Missions Impossible, Skyfall, 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent)
• A holy artifact (All Indianas Jones, every Grail quest movie)
• A Maltese Falcon statue (can’t remember the name of this movie; readers, write in!)

Lest you think this is an older device, many of the highly popular Marvel movies have involved looking for glove jewelry.  It’s even highlighted by Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy:

“So, this orb has a real shiny blue suitcase, Ark of the Covenant, Maltese Falcon sort of vibe.”

Why is this important for nonprofit fundraisers?  Because it’s not about the thing.  It’s about what the thing means.

The well you are building is a MacGuffin.  The goat you are symbolically giving is a MacGuffin.  The meal, the coat, the surgery, the cure: MacGuffins all.

Recipients don’t care about the well.  They care about the health the well gives their family and what they can do with the time they aren’t gathering water.  Donors don’t care about the well.  They care about the way providing the well made them feel.

And as a fundraiser, you shouldn’t care about the well except as the thing that propels the story.

But we still read donor newsletters and annual reports that say “we built 693 wells” without talking about what the well means.

This would be like reading Ethan Hunt’s resume (Stopped release of two agent lists; Destroyed a virus named Chimera; Prevented arms dealer from getting The Rabbit’s Foot; Performed other duties as assigned) instead of watching action movies.

No one wants that.  We want to see the running, the planning, the ebbing timer.  And we want the feeling that gives us.

The Significant Objects Project has tested this.  In the first iteration, they had people buy thrift store junk.  Then they had stories written about each of the objects and posted them on eBay.  They sold $129 of junk for $3613.  Their next experiments involved raising money for charitable writing projects for kids.  Every time they invested an object with a story, it became worth more in real American dollars.  You can read more about this here.

More in our realm, our Behavioral Science Unit has found the identifiable victim effect as one of the key findings that can improve our fundraising.

Objects are cheap.  Stories are priceless.

Nick