How Much is a Prayer Worth?
There’s lots of talk about non-financial behavior– often dubbed “engagement”– and trying to understand the financial value of it. If someone likes or shares your post, reads your email, signs a digital petition and the list goes on and on…what is it worth?
Religious charities often ask people to submit a prayer in some form or fashion. What might this be worth? One study took a novel approach to this by determining what people would pay to have a stranger say a prayer on their behalf.
The answer? $2.34, per prayer. As you might expect, non-believers are willing to pay some lesser amount to not have a prayer said on their behalf, -$1.56.
Why does the non-believer assigning negative value to prayer matter? For religious charities that are overtly so, it doesn’t. The overwhelming majority of those supporters will be supportive of prayer and so there’s only upside.
But what about those more (or less) secular groups that wonder whether some portion of their supporter base is giving for religious reasons? Tread very lightly here. First off, we know from our work that Religious people don’t typically give to secular groups for Religious reasons.
We all have more than one Identity and while religion is a big one and certainly explains my giving to a religious charity it is unlikely to explain my giving to a secular group. And the error of commision is high – namely reducing my value by asking me to pray if you’re wrong about me being religious or wrong about me wearing my religion Identity for your secular cause.
But why are people willing to pay to have a stranger pray for them? This is the interesting part for religious charities. The two main reasons are believing they’ll receive emotional comfort as the prayer beneficiary and equally, that the person saying the prayer will emotionally benefit.
Flip this around and it supports the notion of explicitly mentioning the two-sided benefit when you ask your supporters to pray. Don’t limit the likelihood they pray nor the benefit they receive by failing to explicitly mention how they’ll feel better from praying. That can be expressed lots of ways, just don’t let not saying it be one of them.
Kevin
8 responses to “How Much is a Prayer Worth?”
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Only $2.34 per prayer? I think we need to market a pack of 10.
🙂
Just $2.34 for a prayer? I think we need to market a 10 pack. 🙂
Good idea Chris, I prefer my packs in 6’s but to each his own…
Very helpful, thank you. I’m filing this under, “Don’t underestimate the power of giving (or forget to extol it the giver)” – and prayer is certainly a form of giving.
Indeed, good point Brett and thanks for commenting
“First off, we know from our work that Religious people don’t typically give to secular groups for Religious reasons.” What you said there shed light on something that puzzled us … thank you, Kevin. We knew that many of the donors to a particular client self-identified as religious in their lives (there was good data on that). And yet they were giving to our client, a secular charity working with refugees. We wanted to try speaking to their fuller identity, while keeping things secular. So we started introducing lightly “faith-y” words into newsletter headlines; e.g., the occasional “Bless you,” for instance. It took about 4 issues to get the tone right. That newsletter now brings in more than $400,000 (not a misprint) per issue, much higher than before. Did the occasional “bless you” leverage all that? Well, little details DO matter … especially when you’re trying to create a warm personality for a donor newsletter.
A prayer reply card is very effective with religious charities. I have seen response rates average between 8% – 11% for Thank You letters with no ask , just the thank you letter, BRE and a prayer reply card.
To put it another way, a No Ask Thank You letter program with a prayer card and RE allows you to budget between $10 – $15 per donor at the start of the fiscal year. Not bad for something you are doing anyway!
Don’t forget religious charities are in the business, so to speak, of praying so the “premium” fits in with the message/ mission of the charity.
Thanks Dave for your comment and evidence. The $10-$15 per is a big deal. Most charities have large portions of their donor file whose predictive value going into any given year is under $7.
Your last point about it being on-brand is in line with our cautionary note about thinking Religious people give to non-religious charities for religious reasons. On the flip side, many religious charities, especially those with a lineage of religion that may have waxed and waned over the years would be well served to pick a lane (based on your ‘essence’ as brand and mission) and never deviate. Compassion Intl is probably the most successful brand in the world at having their essence permeate every single decision (fundraising or otherwise) they make. And it shows in their wild financial success and growth.