It is a “best practice” to put certain things in fine print.  Car dealerships run through their loan information at a speed that would make the Micro Machine man quail.  Telemarketers run through the part where they are paid solicitors as briefly as the law will allow.  And Apple’s 20,000-word opus iTunes Terms and Conditions has just been adapted into a graphic novel.

I’m not making this up.

But there may be a reason to take at least one of these out of the footnotes and into the sunlight.  In a paper called “Do I Care if You Are Paid?”, Gneezy et al looked at a door-to-door fundraising campaign.  Some of the solicitors were paid and some were not.  Each of these groups was then split into revealing their paid/unpaid status or not.  In addition, those people who were supposed to reveal their un/paid status wore a name badge with “paid worker” or “unpaid volunteer” under their name.

In their F2F outreach, they talked to over 1000 people and found that when paid solicitors revealed that they are paid, the mean donation increased by 16%.  This was due to an increase in donation rate from 16% to 19% rather than an increase in average gift.

Interestingly, women exclusively drove this difference.  Mean donation went from $2.33 to $4.38 when women were informed that someone was a paid solicitor and response rate went from 15% to 23%.  Men’s mean donation went down when informed someone was paid, but the overall effect was positive for all people.

So the ideal solution would be to reveal paid solicitor status only to women and not to men, but if you were creating a one-size-fits-all policy, it is better to reveal and do so openly than not to reveal.

This got me thinking – what else deserves a reprieve from the fine print?

Research from DonorVoice’s own Dr. Kiki Koutmeridou found that the thing you can do to make your opt-in process the most compelling is to allow people to control the types and/or amounts of communications they get:

This is off-neglected online (partly as the result of inflexible unsubscribe solutions in some of the nonprofit industry’s biggest email solutions), but even more so offline.  One must often call a special number in fine print then do a little jig to get removed from a nonprofit list.

Like the paid solicitor information, it likely pays to have this information transparent, easy, and (gasp) legible instead of burying it.  If donors know they can change how they hear from you (or stop it entirely if they tire of you), they are more likely to begin a relationship with you.  This is for the same reason that you are more likely to go on a first date with a person than marry them.

What else deserves to be pulled from the fine print?  Love your thoughts on the comments below.