There are a bold few nonprofits who have decided they have enough donations.  Instead of using behavioral science to increase their donations, they are using it to dissuade people from donating.

Let’s look at some of their tactics so that we might also lower donations (anonymized, of course, as I’ve donated to several of these organizations, thwarting their plans). Or – and I’m being a bit crazy here – we could avoid these pitfalls.

Letting people know that few others are donating. You’ve probably heard of social proof: people tend to default to what other people are doing.  Most are using this power to increase donations, like the social proof cue on MADD’s donation form that reads “Most people are giving $100 now.  Please give what you can.”  This gets even more powerful if you can localize it to an area (e.g., “most Greendale residents give $76.”).

But at least one organization is using negative social proof to make sure that the default is not donating, with copy that reads:

“The average gift we receive is about $38, but only a tiny portion of our users donate. If everyone receiving this email donated $3 right now we would meet our fundraising goal within the hour.

Only a tiny portion of our users donate. Imagine that you were a waiter in a restaurant that hung a sign that said “Only a tiny portion of our patrons tip.”  How long do you think you would stay working there before moving across the street, where the sign reads “Our average diner tips 20%.”?

Talking masses instead of an individual. We’ve talked about how people have problems processing large-scale suffering in this post (warning: Game of Thrones Season 7 spoilers).  In short, talking about one individual performs better than talking about two individuals or talking about a larger problem.  Even if you talk about a person and then shift to a larger problem, you still suppress response rate unless you use the unit asking effect.

All nonprofits doing fundraising for Hurricane Harvey and other disasters are excused from this, as the need get to get out a message swamps the need to get a story of the storm.*

But what about the everyday appeal that opens with “Deprived of an education, children in developing countries like Haiti find themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty. As a result, they see no future beyond a life of hunger, squalor and want.”?

It’s likely that 90%+ of the stories of any one of those children would have raised more money.

Giving negative labels to donors. Behavioral science tells us that nouns have power.  Researchers got 29% more children to help when they said that children choose “to be helpers” rather than “to help.”  It’s why parenting guides advise you to label a child positively and separate their misdeeds from them (that is, all children are good kids who did a bad thing, rather than a bad child).  It’s also why you can remember the nickname they had for you in high school trig, but not what a cosine is.

So imagine my surprise when I got an email from a favorite charity that displayed, when the images were turned off on my phone, “lapsed_donor.jpg.”

First, I’m not – I had donated to walks and through the mail rather than online, making me the first person ever who wanted to direct a donation to database systems rather than general mission.

But more importantly, if I’m labeled a lapsed donor, I’m more likely to become a lapsed donor.  Consider the Audubon Society’s reverse tactic – they achieved a 50% win-back rate by telling lapsed donors “because you’ve been a loyal donor for many years,” they are renewing the membership free of charge for this one year.

So, “loyal donor” versus “lapsed donor”: pick the former if you want to keep donors and the latter if you want to drive them away.

What other tactics have you seen scientifically designed to turn donors off? Please share in the comments.

* This does give me the opportunity to share one of my favorite quotes from one of the people helping in the storm.  “Mattress Mack,” owner of Gallery Furniture, opened his stores to the displaced and used his box trucks to get people to safety.  Quote Mack, when asked about the impact to his business:

“We’ll have a Harvey floor model sale, or something. I’ll come up with some shtick. These people are nice. They’re taking care of the furniture. Furniture’s made to be sat on, slept on, laid on, whatever. It’s just a product. It ain’t gonna hurt it.”