Does Reason Appeal To Donors?
Most of the advice given to fundraisers — from major gift officers to direct response copywriters — regarding reaching donors properly focuses on emotion. Reaching the heart, not the mind … or at least the heart before the head!
And there’s heaps of research on how we humans process experience and information to back up that advice. It should scarcely need repeating.
But what about rationality and logic? Do these ever enter the equation? Do donors ever use reason as part of their consideration process? As in, which organization seeking my support might be more effective … have a better strategy … have a better track record … use their resources more prudently?
Two recent articles about reason have caught my attention.
The hard-line view was expressed by Dean Karlan, a Yale economist writing in the Wall Street Journal. Karlan doesn’t mince words:
“In the U.S. alone, we donate more than $300 billion a year to nonprofits. But when it comes to what those nonprofits actually do, donor ignorance is rampant. The result is donations to ineffective organizations, and a suppression of generosity. Think how much more we might give if we understood exactly how our dollars saved lives or effected change.”
Karlan has launched ImpactMatters, “an organization that will conduct impact audits, share successful charities with donors, help nonprofits improve and set standards for the industry.”
‘Impact audits’ will “alleviate donor ignorance and assess a nonprofit’s efficacy by measuring four key components: transparency, cost-effectiveness, cooperation with other charities (sharing what does and doesn’t work) and ‘theory of change’, which refers to whether an organization’s means accomplish its mission.”
Now, I’m glad Professor Karlen will be out there helping us sort the wheat from the chaff. And seriously, I would like to see the number of charities cut by some huge percentage. Is there any reason to believe that Pareto’s 80/20 principle doesn’t apply to the charity world? Might it be true that 20% of the nonprofits and charities accomplish 80% of the results?
While ImpactMatters does appeal to my analytical nature, I can’t yet tell whether Karlen would just like to see us donors give smarter, or whether he’s totally dismissive of emotion and its organic, legitimate and permanent role in our giving decisions. The latter would be a big mistake, reflecting a crucial lack of insight into human behavior.
So I felt more resonance with the second article.
In The Feel-Good School of Philanthropy, Jamil Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, writing in the NY Times, discusses ‘effective altruism’. This is just a fancy way of saying the donor is focused on thinking through how they can make the greatest possible impact on the cause they are trying to advance or need they’d like to meet.
Says Zaki: “The argument that we should maximize the good we do is logically bulletproof. But this is not effective altruism’s only message. The movement also urges givers to divorce their generosity from emotion … Sentimentality, the argument goes, produces giving that is more self-indulgent than helpful.”
As it turns out, Zaki actually winds up making the case for emotion: “These arguments are misguided. Crucially, they fail to account for psychological evidence that emotion — and especially empathy — adds a powerful, positive spark to philanthropy.”
I’m glad to hear, as I’m sure you will be, that the research indicates: “Generosity not only makes givers feel good, but reduces their stress level and even extends their lives.”
Probably also like me, you’re thinking: Why would anyone think giving would make people feel bad and stressed, let alone shorten their lives?!
Still, Stanford can afford such research, and it’s comforting that the results are on our side. Zaki’s article is worth a read.
My verdict on reason? It’s a tool for justifying our preferred feeling state. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, after analysing all their giving options out the wazoo, want to feel that they’ve made a right and beneficial choice. Just like the $25 direct mail donor or the pedestrian dropping some coins in the red kettle.
There’s no escaping ‘feel-good’ giving!
Tom
7 responses to “Does Reason Appeal To Donors?”
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Of course emotion drives giving, giving feels good, and having a good experience begets more giving, so organisations that focus only on the science of their impact will miss a trick (and why the EA movement only appeals to a small niche of donors). The really tricky thing is that trying to sell the feel-good factor (overtly telling someone how great they will feel after giving) backfires, too: people don’t want to think they are giving to feel good, even if that’s what they’re doing.
I suppose we’re always trying to find the one true statement. Nuances can be so pesky. Nuances can take so much time.
But really… It seems like people are afraid of emotions. So it’s “better” and “smarter” and and and … To talk about effective philanthropy… The Peter Singer guy and his cohorts. And now maybe Dean Karlan? Dean Karlan who talked about all the donors who gave to the first Obama presidential campaign…who wanted to join a fight they thought they could win? That’s emotions, I think. That’s MLK and Steinem and PPFA and… Caring about an issue. Loving and hating and anger and fear and and and and…
Sure… Let some rational rationale sneak in. But geez — what’s wrong with emotions, eh Tom? How I feel. And how you feel. And how Roger feels. And and and and…
Beautiful gray clouds of dawn in RI. Very tired. Very frustrated. But still motivated.
Every time I read someone declaring war on silly emotional giving I bristle.
Who are they to declare donors’ decisions are stupid? It always feels to me as if the forces of “reason” simply want to control giving and direct where *they* feel it will be better spent. And yes, I said feel.
There is definitely a need in the sector for better, easier to use measurements of impact. If we’re to throw the old “overhead” ratio overboard (and please, let’s do that), we need a better way. But I’m not convinced that even with such new measurements we can successfully use them to invite donors to give. I think they’ll use them to justify the giving decisions their hearts have already led them to.
Very interesting post. Clearly people make the majority of purchase decisions emotionally; the evidence is surely overwhelming, even when the purchase involves a concrete product that better enables a prior rational assessment of its value to the buyer. I remember once seeing a senior BMW marketing exec speak and say that if people bought rationally, nobody would ever buy a BMW, as rationally it makes more sense to buy a Toyota Camry that does exactly the same thing cheaper. People buy the joy of ownership, not the Bavarian engineering, though they then rationalise the extra cost on the quality of the build. In charity giving, the initial decision is surely invariably emotional. The “forensic donor”who allegedly researches charities before making an empirically-based decision who to support is, I believe, only slightly less mythical than the beast that some believe lives in the big lake outside Alan Clayton’s front door…
This is truly one of my favorite subjects — just ask my staff! I’ve always believed that we are most successful when we appeal to the head and heart at the same time. Short-term gifts can be driven simply by tugging at heartstrings. But to build long-term, sustained relationships with donors we must also tell them how we are actually moving the needle on the serious problem they care about.
It’s one reason why a lot nonprofit storytelling is ineffective. Organizations tell stories that break the donor’s heart, but then fail to build a connection back to a real solution the donor can help advance.
Thanks, as always, for alerting us to some great articles on the topics we love!
I quote one of Dean Karlan’s studies a lot. In it he definitely acknowledged the primacy of emotion, Tom. It was about how anger and frustration drove the upswell of giving to the 2008 Barack Obama presidential contest. I applaud his new approach, just to see if it changes anything; he’s one of my heroes. The world’s problems are growing ever more dependent on nonprofit solutions, I believe; anyone who can make sense of the clutter in the charity marketplace is welcomed by me. I also agree with Kathy, that, while emotion may initiate a gift, a blend thereafter of impact reporting (expressed in stories, not statistics) and loving donor-centricity is a rich and welcome package to deliver.
Professor Karlan himself hits the bullseye (and echoes Kathy’s superb comments) when he says, “Think how much more we might give if we understood exactly how our dollars saved lives or effected change.” If in our appeals, newsletters and other communications we fundraisers aren’t reliably and repeatedly making it crystal-clear to donors how their dollars are saving lives and changing the world, that’s our fault.
Kathy’s right: it’s heart AND head. Using storytelling to swirl donors around a never-ending sea of raw emotion will only get you so far. Fail to connect it to how they bring the lifeboats and you can bet they won’t be back with you for the next mission.
Also Tom B. — one of the best points of this whole post is getting lost, and you made it: too many cooks in the kitchen. Why don’t competing charities merge, or team up, more? Companies do it all the time for scale, reach, and efficiency. Why is our industry stuck in some kind of weird, fear-based infighting tunnel? This charity hates that charity, yet they do the same kind of work, fight the same good fight. For a client I write for, we recently did a newsletter spotlight on how the charity belongs to this greater network of charities focused around the same work — and we name-checked the other orgs. We talked about how it made each one of them more efficient, how when a donor wanted to give to our organization for a specific purpose and we weren’t best-suited to the task, we hooked them up with another org in the network to make it happen faster and better. The issue raised a ton of money, despite the fact that there is never a direct ask in our newsletters. People loved it.