Impulse Giving is Deliberative
That’s the oxymoronic finding from research among donors who selected “it was an impulse decision” from a drop-down menu prompt in a hospice organization’s online checkout process asking why they were donating today.
These donors were further qualified as not having been prompted to visit the site from a fundraising prompt and only having made their way to the donate section by clicking the home page button.
It turns out these impulse donors have a strong connection to the hospice and generally feel knowledgeable about hospice care.
The giving wasn’t lightning in a bottle. The timing was. Giving at Time X was random but giving was going to occur.
What else do we know about the impulse giver aside from them looking a lot on the inside like your best donors? Impulse donors are, well, impulsive naturally. That they give impulsively is who they are not why they do it.
Personality research tells us people low in Conscientious and/or high in Neuroticism are more likely to be these impulsive donors. These humans can be identified using 3rd party data and a tagging process placing different messaging and impulse encouraging signals such as imagery on the donate form.
As sidenote, this imagery suggestion runs counter to Wednesday’s post suggesting removing imagery and other emotive cues to promote more calculative decision making. That holds in general but likely not for this group of impulse donors, who could represent 15-20% of your giving pool if the hospice research is any indication.
Kevin
2 responses to “Impulse Giving is Deliberative”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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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 […]
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Thanks for posting this insightful piece. It’s a reminder of how complex human behavior can be. To most questions, social psychologists answer, “it depends…” What it depends on is the situation and the person’s individual characteristics. Your analysis of impulse “buying” is anchored in what we know about the “Big 5” personality traits. In psychology, the Big 5 is regarded as the “gold standard” of personality analytics due to its decades-long research. It’s the only psychometric construct regarding personality to reach scientific consensus. Your use of the Big 5 sets you apart from the rest; it’s a great tool for understanding donor behavior.
Thanks Otis as always for the thoughtful comments and continued readership. We have managed to bake Personality into the cake for our fundraising in every channel. The starting point for the breakthrough was a large dataset collected over time of donors answering the Big Five assessment. This gave us first-party, reliable trait scores for thousands and thousands of donors. We spent the better part of a year doing the product development to now be able to algorithmically derive these scores using 3rd party data as proxy and score up an entire database with personality scores. The scaling of Personality science was always the barrier, especially for direct mail or any other non-digital channel. Digital always offered 2nd party data as proxy (e.g., Facebook) though that too required some significant prod dev work, especially after FB turned off the lights on so much of their first-party data no longer available for targeting.
Of course knowing someone has high propensity to be trait dominant on Openness, for instance, is very different from knowing how to talk differently to those people. Targeting/scoring is one thing, having subject matter expertise to know how to tailor and personalize is the other hand clapping.