Breaking Up with Warm Glow: Why Your Donors Deserve a Deeper Flame

People like to give because it fosters a warm glow. Therefore, more asking equals more opportunities for this warm glow. Ergo, donors are happy, satisfied, and fueled with positive motivation to keep giving contingent on you continually asking. When I see this logic train cited it conjures up a record player’s arm lifted, the needle […]

When Avocados Met Toast: A Millennial Love Story Gone Too Far

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far too obsessed with demographics, fundraisers posing as researchers discovered young people crave authenticity, sustainability, and trustworthiness. And, in a stroke of genius, they declared these desires exclusive to the young, as if generations before had thrived on artificiality, wastefulness, and deceit. The hilarious notion that these values […]

Use Case #3,468 for GPT: Surveys

You’ll find what I imagine to be at least 3,467 use-cases splattered across the internet.   That makes this example, use case 3,468 and it’s uber novel, using GPT to generate survey research responses. That’s right, a machine answering survey questions and using a wash/repeat method to produce a dataset of say, 1,000 responses.   That may […]

Does Your A/B (Testing) Need to Meet C and D?

What do 127,000 experiments over five years from a variety of sectors, including fundraising, tell us about what’s required to run better experiments?  First, let’s define better: higher chance of winning and bigger uplift, which creates a multiplier for expected impact; the % chance of winning * likely uplift = expected impact. Here’s our take […]

What is GPT’s Personality?

Can a machine have a Personality?  Well, it can be instructed to produce copy that matches certain traits and with guidance, does this quite well. A machine can be programmed to identify and match or mimic the dominant trait of a human on the other side of a text or chatbot conversation.  This mirroring technique […]

Urgency and Crying Wolf

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a cautionary tale of urgency messaging.  If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it a million (ish) times.  Urgency is critical to get donors to take action now.  Is it really that simple?   When might urgency messaging backfire?  Or maybe there is just a better motivator than urgency to prompt […]

Open, Keep, Convert: Mastering the Charity Mail Journey

The DonorVoice Behavioral Science Team is calling for applications to participate in a direct mail innovation project.  Details are below. Simply Click here to express interest and the team will follow up accordingly. Overview Your best “digital” donors are your direct mail recipients.  And still, almost all your charity mail goes directly in the trash, […]

The Doom Loop

If it bleeds it leads.  This media cliche begs the question, is the media feeding us negativity we swallow like bad medicine or are they giving us a spoonful of our preferred elixir? The Russian news site, City Reporter, did an experiment for an entire day publishing nothing but positive stories.  The result?  They lost […]

6 Minutes and 46 Seconds To Be Reminded and Inspired

Human vs. Machine

We humans built the machines so the “vs.” doesn’t properly credit our maker status bona fides.  Having said that, machine is often much faster and yes, better. Here’s another instance that feels pretty close to home.  This experiment used professional copywriters to draft ad campaign copy, 100 words or fewer, for an NGO for four […]