Does raising awareness sell?  That is, do people want to donate money to raise awareness about an issue or organization?  Or do they want to fund efforts to remediate wrongs directly?  Robert Smith and Norbert Schwarz wanted to find out.

Actually, being good scientists, they wanted to analyze donor’s metacognition about awareness activities vis-à-vis whether the cause was already in the donor consideration set.  Which means the same thing when you translate it into English.

They found three major things:

• When people knew more about a charity and its work, they were more likely to donate to it and the more they were likely to donate to the mission activities. The researchers actually manipulated this knowledge in a cool way. They asked subjects questions about what they had read about a charity, but there were two sets of questions: an easy one and a hard one.  The people who got the easy set of questions and thus thought they knew more about the subject were more likely to donate.  (Lesson: if your donors think they are knowledgeable about you, they will donate more to your mission.)
• This result reversed when the charity was engaging in awareness activities. That is, if people thought they knew all about the charity and its aims (that is, they got the easy questions), they were less likely to want to invest in the charity’s efforts to raise awareness.
• Looking at actual donations (not just intent to give), people gave far more to help than to raise awareness when they knew a lot about a cause. When they thought they knew less, they gave slightly more to the mission than to the awareness activities.

This makes sense.  If you think the average person (which people usually consider to be a slightly dumber version of themselves) knows about something, why would s/he donate money to raise awareness?  On the flip side, if s/he felt there was a story that was undertold, that people needed to hear, they might ante up.

This has a major implication for nonprofits as they mature: what got you here won’t get you where you are going.  In the infancy stage of a nonprofit, it is acceptable simply to point at a problem and say “this is a problem; we need to get more people like you to acknowledge the problem.”  However, as nonprofits mature and people are aware of the issue the cause represents, it needs either to adjust its fundraising efforts to focus on what it is doing to solve the problem or to find more obscure areas of its cause to reenergize its donor base.

This also has implications for donor communications: there’s a difference between what you talk about to acquire a donor and to retain one.  That is, people who are your supporters know you and your issues (or, at least, think they do).  They don’t want to support awareness activities for things they think people already know about.  On the other hand, people who are new to your organization may be willing to chip in to help spread the word.

This also fits with donors wanting different communications based on their commitment levels to the organization.  For those who haven’t committed the back catalog to memory, here’s what we said in December:

Those who don’t know as much about you need to get more introductory communications; those who are passionate about you need fewer.

This sounds counterintuitive in a direct marketing world where conventional wisdom preaches greater volume to those who love us and more tentative efforts with those on the fence.  However, the data bear this out.

A nonprofit looked at high-commitment versus low-commitment donors and the difference between 0, 6, or 12 introductory non-ask communications.

First, the obvious result: no one wanted 12 additional communications.

Those donors who were highly committed to the organization had their retention go down by nine percentage points when they got additional communications. They said things like, “Stop convincing me; I’m already convinced.”  …

But for low-commitment donors, the six additional communications corresponded to a 12-point increase in retention. They said things like, “I believe you do important work, but I actually don’t know you well.” The study is discussed in more detail here.

So people who support you more and know more about you want fewer communications, but want them focused on helping rather than awareness. And those who know less want to know more and want others to know more.

It’s intuitive.  It’s also rarely done.

Nick