Doggy Personality
I’m a dog person. I have two dogs and my children and wife only semi-kiddingly suggest the dogs are my top priority. They always agree with me and never complain, what’s not to like?
Turns out my dog choice is a reflection of my personality. Neurotic people have neurotic dogs (plot on left) and extraverted people have more outgoing dogs. The other traits show a similar pattern.
And while the chicken and egg of all this is hard to parse out, three interesting, sub-findings argue there is some cause and effect going on here.
- The dog personality rating was done by the owner but also independently by a person who knew the dog but wasn’t the owner. The correlations still hold.
- Maybe everyone who knows the dog (and the owner by extension) is projecting the owner personality onto the dog? Why then doesn’t it hold for the 2nd dog in those households?
- There is no relationship between length of ownership and the dog/owner personality match. One could imagine owners and those who know the dogs being more likely to rate the two as the same if they’ve been together longer but that isn’t the case.
In separate dog and owner personality research there is a match between breed and owner personality. Tiny, toy (e.g. chihuahua) are more likely to be owned by people high in Openness. Lab owners? They’re high in Agreeableness, just like the stereotype for the breed.
What about hunting breeds? Yep, you guessed it, people higher in Conscientiousness who are more ideologically conservative and more likely to live in non-urban settings.
Imagine something so powerful it determines, in part, whether we marry, who we marry, whether we have kids, our profession, our interest in nature and art, musical taste, job performance, mental health, volunteer behavior, grade point average, dog or cat owner and yes, type of dog?
What are the chances Personality doesn’t play a role in the decision to support your charity?
Now imagine you can tag your house file and put every donor into a Personality bucket and have a crib sheet on words to use, images to use and examples of a facebook ad and letter for each trait?
What would prevent you from doing this? This last question isn’t intended to be rhetorical, we are genuinely interested in what barriers our readers think stand in the way of a trial.
Your thoughts please
Kevin
7 responses to “Doggy Personality”
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 […]
Read Full Answer
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 […]
Read Full Answer
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 […]
Read Full Answer
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 […]
Read Full Answer
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 […]
Read Full Answer
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 […]
Read Full Answer
Thanks Kevin. How does one get this info, and how does it comport with GDPR? If I’m not mistaken, there are much tighter rules on appends etc in Europe Vs the U.S.? Thanks! (Proud owner of a very goofy golden retriever (she boldly ate a muffin full of raisins that was discarded in a field yesterday and we had to get her stomach pumped!))
Hi Colin, hope all is well. As a golden retriever owner you are more likely to be Agreeable and that suggests a moral framing of wanting to provide care/prevent harm and someone who is generally eager to help others. You do work in the charity sector so that fits…
Sorry to hear about the stomach pumping incident. You’re right, this is done with 3rd party, public data as proxy. We use 128 different attributes (roughly evenly split over the Big Five traits) to accurately predict a dominant trait for each person. But, one country’s “public” is another country’s “off-limits” and as a general rule, we have access to a lot more of this data as public in the US than outside of it so we don’t offer this service beyond US shores. However, targeting on social media (facebook) is available to non-US charities and we have our set of proxies for that world that aren’t restricted by country. Let me know if you’d like to learn more about how to aim FB ads at particular traits and tailor content accordingly.
Hi Kevin, yep my five factor model has me very high in agreeableness alright, and I do work for an INGO as you say! I’d love to learn more about how this might be done through Facebook. Really fascinated with the possibilities of tailoring to ocean model and moral foundations theory. Will try and find your email and drop you a line, or if you’re agreeable please do share it here. Mine is colin.skehan@trocaire.org.
Kevin,
I’ve long believed this to be true and have seen it validated anecdotally over hundreds of dog owners. To further the argument’s accuracy I’ve found that there are no bad dogs…only bad dog owners. My 4 rescue beasts (all male and all over 70 lbs.) are sweet and gentle and mindful, yet will pounce aggressively if threatened. Hmmm…
Thanks for the post!
Hi Dee, hope all is well and thanks for commenting. I’ve got two dogs, same breed. Both were picked before they were old enough to display any personality so it’s hard/impossible to apply in my situation. Having said that, people would likely score the older (first) dog as more like me and the second less so. But again, that seems to be luck matching the trend vs. valid support of it.
Hi Kevin!
Barriers for my organization:
1. We are just now starting to collect data and I’m not sure all of the data we have is relevant to how we would segment them.
2. A third party produces and sends our DM and e-appeals, making it more expensive for each additional segment.
3. We have a small team with limited bandwidth.
4. We have an old CRM (RE – the older version), but we are getting a newer CRM later this year, which will hopefully make segmenting easier.
All of this is to say, it has not been a priority yet to segment donors, but I would like to it to be. I’m relatively new to fundraising and would like to know your thoughts on getting around these barriers so that I can make it more of a priority.
Thank you!
P.S. Mom of 2 neurotic rescues dogs and 8 neurotic rescue cats.
Hi Laurie, thanks for being a reader and for the feedback, it is very helpful and I imagine you are far from alone with the barriers you cite.
A few quick thoughts, happy to informally chat 1 on 1 if helpful.
1. This is easier said than done but the spirit of European data privacy laws are a useful rubric for data collection here in the states – don’t collect if don’t have a plan to use it. Even if data is easy to get (e.g. 3rd party data appends) it doesn’t make it useful. We use 128 3rd party data elements to create a single, useful, store in your CRM worthy variable called Personality. There are one of five values that never change. But, appending any, much less all, of the “raw ingredient” 128 to your CRM records would be huge waste of time and resource.
2. I get that a lot of agencies charge on “volume” or “time” markups and that is hard to un-entrench. One option is test this personality segmentation at the margins and go around the agency, not through. Pitch it (accurately) as innovation testing. The agency is about delivering this year’s number and often the best way to do so is by copying last year. That do no harm adage has a place but it can’t produce new horizons and growth so bet small on big ideas. You can do social ad testing tailoring to Personality to validate the lift and use that relatively inexpensive, in-market “win to press with the agency or take the next step to apply to emails and then, eventually direct mail.
3. It does require trade-offs and choices to allocate limited time. Fortunately social media (e.g. Facebook) testing of the sort I’m describing is low cost and low time.
4. The CRM lament is familiar and it’s probably cold comfort but we hear the same thing from those having made the switch to the newer, shinier CRM option. This one always confounds as any CRM – old or new – can accommodate adding a custom field. So, it seems less about the CRM’s ability to store segment related fields and more about either the query capability or the link/sync between these fields, the query and an email mkt system, for instance.