Breastfeeding, Buttons and Fundraising Tradition
Have you ever wondered why women’s and men’s buttons are on opposite sides? I have and file this as yet another useless bit of trivia taking up limited space in my brain. Many sorta, kinda plausible theories have been spun up over the years on why:
- Breasfeeding. Right-hand dominant mothers cradling a baby on the left, freeing the right hand to unbutton. Plausible enough if we’re grading on a curve.
- Horseback riding. Women rode with both legs on the left, so buttons on the left supposedly reduced the breeze blowing up the dress. Creative, at least.
- And then there’s the Napoleon theory, which is where the imagination really goes off the rails. The story goes that women mocked him by tucking their hand into their blouse, so the emperor, wounded pride and all, decreed that women’s garments must button the opposite way. Alas, button placement conventions predate Napoleon but it’s a good story.
The truth is far more boring and far more telling. Wealthy women were dressed by attendants. Men dressed themselves. Buttons were placed for the convenience of the person doing the work.
Centuries have passed and I’ll wager most women now dress themselves, even the Kardashians. So, behavior changed but convention hasn’t.
The fundraising parallel seems clear, we inherit tactics the same way clothing inherits button conventions. No one remembers why they started, no one remembers when they stopped fitting, and no one wants to do the archaeological dig required to replace them and so they persist.
Mail-era segmentation and design and list selection used as if digital didn’t upend donor behavior. Cadences so rigid they function more like a liturgy than a decision. One message fits all because “that’s how we’ve always done it” is easier to defend than “we don’t have the evidence.” Internal convenience masquerading as strategy.
The breastfeeding, horses, and Napoleon theories at least admit they’re guessing. Fundraising rarely does, it just keeps running the inherited default and calling it best practice.
Buttons stayed put because no one questioned the pattern. That kind of inertia costs you nothing in clothing but it costs you plenty in revenue.
If you’re serious about growth, stop accepting stories you haven’t examined and defaults you didn’t choose. Start designing around actual donor psychology, trait-level differences, and evidence that maps to how people behave now, not how the craft operated decades ago.
Otherwise, you’re just reenacting the same mistake: preserving a convention that stopped making sense long ago and insisting it’s natural.
Kevin
4 responses to “Breastfeeding, Buttons and Fundraising Tradition”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Thanks so much for raising this. Yes, capturing donor information can be helpful for stewardship like newsletters, thank-you letters, impact updates. But how you ask matters. Forcing full data capture introduces friction that can significantly depress conversion, many donors may simply abandon the process. Beyond the friction itself, required fields also shift the emotional experience […]
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Unlike holidays that everyone already knows, Giving Tuesday is a created event. Many donors recognize the name but not the exact timing, so referencing it becomes a helpful cue. It serves as a reminder and taps into social norm activation (“everyone’s giving today”), which boosts response. However, we still want it paired with the mission, […]
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When a subject line leads with the match (“Your gift matched!”), it risks triggering market-norm thinking: the sense that giving is a financial transaction rather than an act rooted in values, identity, and care. This shift reduces intrinsic motivation and, over time, can weaken donor satisfaction and long-term engagement. It also makes the email indistinguishable […]
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There’s no evidence that QR codes suppress mid-value giving; all available research suggests they either help or have no negative effect. In fact, behavioral and usability research consistently shows the opposite: reducing friction at any point in the donation process increases completion rates and total response. And that has nothing to do with capacity and […]
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What you’re experiencing is very common. Resistance often isn’t about capability, but about motivation quality. If board members feel pushed into fundraising, that triggers controlled motivation (low quality motivation) i.e. obligation, guilt, or fear of judgment, which often results in avoidance. Instead, we need to create conditions for volitional motivation (high quality motivation) by satisfying […]
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That’s a really thoughtful question, and you’re not the first to raise it. Many of our clients have been cautious about placing the ask at the very end. To address their concern, we’ve tested both approaches, and the results are clear: when the ask comes last, even if that means it appears on the second […]
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Kevin,
Given that we’ve spent a decade together elbow-deep in The Agitator’s Sacred Cows copy basket—where myth, mayhem, and the occasional editorial food fight usually roost—you’d think I’d have checked it yesterday before your post wandered into daylight this morning. Somehow I didn’t.
Fortunately, I couldn’t agree more with what you’ve written. And so—for the first time in ten years—I’ll publicly comment on your work.
Your meditation on buttons—those humble artifacts of habits long outgrown—lands squarely in our trade’s blind spot. Too many fundraisers cling to conventions whose origins no one remembers and whose usefulness no one has tested since fax machines were considered “fast.”
And our sector’s “button fallacies” are legion: the sacred HPC ask string “because that’s how fable says it goes,” the RFM tablets carried down from Mt.Sinai, the holy war over copy length, the worship of importance of second gifts, the gospel of “ask more, make more,” and the chronic terror of abandoning buttons for AI zippers even when staff shortages, limited budgets, and crushing workloads beg to modernize the outfit.
These aren’t strategies—they’re rituals. And like your breastfeeding–horses–Napoleon theories, they persist mainly because no one bothers to lift the fabric and examine the stitching.
In clothing, inertia costs nothing. In fundraising, it costs revenue, trust, and relevance.
So yes: let’s keep tipping these sacred cows.Let’s question the defaults we didn’t choose.
Let’s design for the donor in front of us—not the mythical creature preserved in amber from 1987.
Otherwise, we’re just reenacting the Great Button Fallacy—treating yesterday’s unchallenged “best practices”as today’s truth and insisting it’s natural.
—Roger
Roger, I had to sneak this one past the goal-line for fear the blog title would get red flagged by the Temperance Society insisting I swap ‘breastfeeding’ for ‘nourishment via upper-torso provisioning.’
One of my favourite book titles ever: Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers: Paradigm-Busting Strategies for Developing Change-Ready People and Organizations. I read it decades ago but i suspect it stands the test of time. And like you, subscribe to the theory too.
Hi Harvey, I recall that book, thanks for the reminder to re(read), ok re-skim.