The Power of Celebrity (or lack thereof)
in our board meeting bingo run-through of the things you don’t want to hear your board say, I forgot “let’s reach out to X celebrity to see if they will market for us.” (Extra bonus points if X is Oprah.)
It comes up frequently. And it’s painful to have to say “yes, it would be great if The Rock and Dame Judi Dench would co-host our gala, but since we don’t know them nor they us…”, then try to find gentler ways to let the speaker down than talking about flying pigs or hell-bound snowballs.
But how much does having a celebrity associated with your pitch help? A presentation from the recent Behavioral Science Symposium by Dr. Peter Ayton can help point the way.
He and his colleagues looked at BBC Radio 4 appeals for nonprofits and coded them across different variables that had been shown to increase giving in previous studies:
- A single-identified victim that you help
- Whether there was a requested donation that solved a specific program (“your X pounds buys Y”, where Y is a goat, mosquito net, medical test, etc.)
- The biological sex of the presenter
- The celebrity status of the presenter
- Self-interest of the presenter
- Pitch of voice (lower-pitched voices have been shown to increase effectiveness)
- Whether the presenter had experience or expertise in the topic
As well as some more standard charity questions like how much the nonprofit already gets, how many people were listening, and what average gift was requested.
Two, and only two, of these variables had a statistically significant relationship with the amount donated. Have your guesses in mind?
The two were sex of the presenter – males outraised females – and, above all others, whether the donation solved a specific problem. While most appeals did not have this type of impact articulated, all top five adverts did:
This impact, though, only happened when the presenter did not also have a self-interest in the topic. The full talk is below; I highly recommend it (and you can see all the behavioral science presentations here on DonorVoice’s YouTube channel):
Note what’s missing – the celebrity status of the presenter. It didn’t matter. You would have been better off putting your time and effort into creating the best possible value proposition for what a person’s donation does.
You probably already knew this (it was your board members you had to convince). But maybe there’s some benefit around the margins – if a celebrity can present a solid value proposition, that’s likely better than some person off the street?
No Kid Hungry tested this using the DonorVoice Pre-Test Tool. The video below is cued up to when we talk about it, but they tested:
- A principal at a school
- A child getting food
- A parent whose child was getting food
- Their founder, Billy Shore
- Jeff Bridges, one of America’s leading actors not involved in acquiring the Infinity Stones (although, as Obadiah Stane in Iron Man, he did start Tony Stark’s journey to being an Avenger, but that’s a rabbit hole on a whole ‘nother tangent)
- Duff Goldman, TV’s Ace of Cakes
Long story short, the child impacted by the mission was #1 and the parent of the child was #2. Jeff “the Dude” Bridges abided #3, followed closely by the principal. Duff, then Billy, brought up the rear:
So a celebrity in this case wasn’t a bad voice for the organization, but wasn’t the best voice. Rather, it was asking those most directly affected by the issue to tell their stories.
There you have it! In the BBC case, celebrities had no impact, and in the second, they did but not as much as those impacted by the mission. In either case, the celebrity spokesperson is easily replaced and surpassed by telling a strong story well.
This may not stop board members from trying to get Rich Little or Little Richard to headline for you, but when you don’t get them, at least you’ll know there’s little impact as a result of their absence.
Nick
11 responses to “The Power of Celebrity (or lack thereof)”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Brilliant insights, as usual!
Thank you.
Big thanks for this article. Our board members keep wanting us to reach out to Michael Phelps (huge sigh)……
To me, that sounds like a great project for said board members… 🙂
Phew, finally – the voice of reason! I remember when I served on the board of a women’s organization where we had an annual budget ranging from about $4,000 to about $10,000 (on an astonishingly lucrative year). The rest of the board wanted us to get Madonna or maybe Gloria Estefan as our celebrity. I’m still laughing 20 years later…
My idea of a celebrity in this regard would be a local celebrity. maybe a popular radio personality or athlete who (aligned with our cause) grew up in public education or a charter school district and can relate to school choice and the impact of high quality education.
Yes – a celebrity who has a personal story to tell about the impact of the organization or mission is a different kettle of fish. One area where we’ve seen celebrities work well is with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation — not surprisingly, because the athletes telling their story are also the people you are helping with your gift. Same thing for staff. Only once in testing did we see a CEO signer perform anything better than last place; it was for a disease charity where the CEO had that disease themselves and told their story. In those cases, the person is a benefit recipient or person impacted by the mission first, celebrity/staff member second. (Same reason you never saw Sarah McLachlan on ASPCA ads without her dog)
Just a few anecdotes from my years ago employer Save The Bay. Environmental organization recruits Ted Danson at the height of his Cheers fame to be the celebrity guest at its annual fundraiser. The event sells out, with a wide range of people from throughout the state buying tickets. Residual effect… a vast growth in name recognition for the organization as the group that brought Ted Danson to town. And, while your research has not shown that a branding investment is statistically linked to fundraising, I can say it was a heck of a lot easier to get doors opened when virtually everyone knew who you were and that Ted Danson cared about you — especially as he was linked to environmental causes. (Ted Danson wasn’t the whole part of that, but he helped accelerate it). Having Walter Cronkite and Ted Turner’s names on the advisory council woke some folks up, especially national foundations we were targeting. While I never suggest to any org that they try to become a household name (foolish endeavor), I also have seen the benefits of having 90% of your community recognize your name and want to affiliate with that (as the Boys and Girls Clubs). I’ve also lived the opposite, where we had 86% name recognition but 70% of that was misplaced, thinking it was a different org where there was name confusion. STB also had a celebrity guest speaker most years at its annual meeting. With the celebrity, it usually sold between 600-1200 tickets (the top number was when VP Al Gore attended). After its celebrity getter left the org, those meetings trickled own to a barely a few hundred. While the annual meeting was not a fundraising event, it was a powerful advocacy event. Most of state’s political and many business leaders showed up at the annual meeting to be seen as supporting the organization. The demonstration of its powerful support (including grassroots members) definitely aided its advocacy activities.
A couple of interesting points here – thank you! First is the research I cited was either for one organization in different states (No Kid Hungry with or without a celebrity appeal) or for organizations at a point in time on the radio. This may be an outer bound on the research: not being able to account for the launch potential of a name and the before/after brand exposure.
The second is the challenge of celebrity-attracted donors. To extend your comments about the celebrity getter, the people who showed up when a celebrity came stopped when the celebrity didn’t. Sounds like a similar conundrum to what we often face with event donors or peer-to-peer — people who are giving because of the event or because their friend asked rather than because of a core belief in the organization and their impact. Thanks for raising both!
One other note on the branding investment discussion (and here I’m delving into the realm of speculation so take this with your CostCo-sized grains of salt): my thought when folks were posting about the success of branding investment was that for each success stories, there was a nearly equal and opposite impact where brand investment had a negative impact. Or put another way, the fact that the average brand investment did close enough to zero that we can round to make the math easy doesn’t mean there weren’t cases where there were 50% boosts — it just means there were also 50% hits. The speculation part of this is I haven’t seen distributions of results, but it’s usually the case that an average isn’t also where all cases lie. My goal here is to celebrate those cases where it has shown an impact like you describe in the hopes we can learn from them and turn it into more of a 80/20 stock/bond portfolio from what is currently more of a spin on the roulette wheel.
Thank you for this post. It really is amazing how often this comes up in board meetings – and this is a great segway into what’s more practical and possible.
Glad it is helpful!
Celebrities are the best influencers. Having celebrity on your fundraising will surely make it 100% successful. Thanks for sharing this interesting post.