Our choices are expressions and reflections of who we are.  I won’t pay as much attention to your fundraising message if it doesn’t reflect who I am.

And since people are different, your fundraising needs tailoring to match those varied reflections.  Most readers will probably agree with this statement and yet, the infinity problem stands between  a mental head nod and knowing where to start.

There are countless ways to slice and dice your donor file in search of meaningful differences.    And the pile of non-meaningful noise will dwarf the useful signal.  The needle in the haystack, the infinity problem.

What’s a knowable thing about a person that helps explain everything in this list?

• Choice of Leisure Activities
• Work Ethic and Job Performance
• Musical Genre Preference
• Stress and Coping Mechanisms
• Travel Preferences
• Attention to Detail in Daily Tasks
• Pet Ownership
• Volunteering and Helping Others
• Emotional Response to Life Events

Personality explains all these choices because it acts as a North Star, a general orienting for life.  It’s also plays a role in helping form our values, beliefs and opinions.   Note to haystack, we found the needle.

Here’s example 473 (ballpark…) of experiments showing better outcomes when you match message to trait.  This was a Dutch experiment with 3 ads promoting a left-leaning cause.  I’ve provided the English translation.  The experiment included,

Matching Conditions

• Extraverted ad to known extraverted people (we can score your file to provide you with this – a mere $.15/record)
• Introverted ad to introverts

Mismatched conditions

• Extraverted ad to known introverts
• Introverted ads to extroverts

The ad objective was to increase people’s attitudinal alignment with the cause (political attitude row in results) and vote in support of the cause, 2nd row.  The highlighting shows the ads did best when matching trait.  We’ve found wet water, again.  The study link is here.

Mismatching the trait is no better than the control and sometimes worse.   Your copy is either devoid of trait messaging or its got a natural but unknowing trait match.  The former is like Melba toast, the latter like serving really spicy food – a few will like it, most won’t.

Kevin