In June, psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant came out with Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You.  She reviews the literature to find out how to ask for help in the workplace so both we and the askee are better off.

The funny part is most of the lessons she has for asking for help from another person apply to asking for a donation.  Perhaps this shouldn’t be strange.  We are, after all, asking for help when we write copy, reach out to that donor, or create that landing page.  Some of her tips:

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.  This is a challenge for many new to fundraising or (when I felt it most acutely) when switching from a mass direct marketing context to one-on-one communications.  But most prospective donors are wired to give help.  We think that what we are asking for is an inconvenience or a burden, but when we ask well, we are giving someone an opportunity to behave according to their nature.

Overcome common barriers to help.  Two of the most common reasons people don’t help is they don’t know you need the help and they don’t believe they are the one supposed to help.  In this latter category is diffusion of responsibility – when you are in a crowd, you don’t know why you should step forward among everyone else.  When everyone feels this way, no one helps in a situation where most would have helped if it was one on one.

That’s why the difference between “make our donors feel special” and “make each donor feel special” is an important one.  The more you can tell someone why they are the person who must make the difference and what that difference will be, the more you can avoid the “someone else will help” trap.

Conversely, the “big check photo” of which we’ve spoken lets donors know they are not the person who is supposed to be helping – it’s the people with the big check.

And, not shockingly, you get more help from people in the long-term when you tell them specifically what positive impact they made by helping.  Hopefully, this sounds familiar from fundraising as well.

Quid pro quo backfires.  Roger and Kevin were talking about the long-term costs of premiums five years ago.  So what does Dr. Grant say about this technique?

“Another common mistake is that people will make it transactional. So, they’ll say, if you help me with this, I’ll do this for you in return, or you’ll get this reward for helping me. And that may seem like a good idea because you think, oh, I’m offering this person a reward, why wouldn’t that make it better for them to help me?  But what you’ve actually done is sort of taken out their ability to feel good about it personally.”

Granted, she wasn’t talking specifically about premiums.  She might as well have been.  People give over the long-term at least in part because of the warm glow they get from giving.  If you make them think there’s another reason they are giving, that will replace that glow.

Identity works.  Yes, she talks about donor identity in the book.  Specifically, she says there are two things we can do with identity to increase the positive feeling someone has from giving help.  First, we can engage what’s we’ve called “level one identity”: you are a good person doing a good thing.  From Dr. Grant:

“[I]f I help you, I’m a good person. So, it can be helpful when you’re asking for help and talking about it and say, to acknowledge that aspect of it, to sort of say, wow it would be just incredibly helpful. It would be very generous of you to help me in this way. Again, you’re sort of subtlety reminding that person of how good they’re going to feel about themselves in helping you. So, you can kind of use that sort of language.”

The other is recognizing what Dr. Grant calls “a sense of us” (which I had been calling a shared group or subgroup identity with a common goal: hence why she has the book).  Humans are wired to help their own in-group or tribe.  So if you remind people what they have in common, the common identities we share, and what that identity is helping in this way increases their joy from giving.

Broaden your sphere.  Dr. Heidi Grant talks about some of Dr. Adam Grant’s research that givers are the most, and the least, successful people in an organization.  The difference between whether they are successful or not is whether they can manage the amount of giving they are being asked to do.  As a giver, you must learn to say “no” to protect your own productivity and psyche.

This is what we’ve described donors as doing to prevent themselves from burning out: defensive measures against oversolicitation like having a maybe box or keeping track of donations or only giving to certain sectors.

Thus, it’s our responsibility to broaden the people who are supporting us.  This means adding to our rented-and-modeled-list strategies that ask only those who give for more.  We must make the pie bigger, bringing new people into the joy of giving.

Your thoughts?  How have you found successful techniques in getting people to help – in fundraising or in life?

Nick