Self-driving cars.  Warehouse robots.  Skynet missile defense.  It seems like more and more jobs of the future will be automated.

You may think you are safe as a nonprofit marketer.  But behold: the first ever AI-written appeal letter (thanks to Mark Phillips for posting):

A world first. A computer generated appeal letter. pic.twitter.com/40bkjMqof6

— Mark Phillips (@Markyphillips) November 5, 2018

OK, I can tell you aren’t quaking in your boots.  There are some true gems here that sound like they were Google Translated from Chinese to English via Farsi:

• It will behave as if full of artificial techno trash.
• It takes more than apples and honey to save the world.
• A.I. is about to become something for people.
• Please send your donation by encouraging your generous gifts towards me.
• Very little helps.

And yet, there are some notes in this letter that even experienced marketers can note and apply:

Very little helps.  The wording can use some work, but the goal is to make donors believe they can have a big impact with a small gift.  We’ve talked about this in the context of Wikipedia’s, the Norwegian Cancer Society’s, and political fundraising – giving permission to make small gifts helps.  Specifically, the phrase “even a penny would help” increased F2F giving from 28% to 50% uptake in a Cialdini study.

I am writing to you because you either studied at Manchester or you wanted to. Would this be better if it were customized based on the audience, with one going to people who studied at Manchester and the other going to those who wanted to?  Yes.  But our guess is that the A.I. – named Baby 2.0 – was just tasked with writing one letter.  Given that, identity priming early in a message helps put people in the right frame of mind.  We’ve talked about how adding “as a medical professional” to an ad aimed at medical professionals increased click-through rate by 42%.  Moreover, by leading with this, Baby 2.0 told the prospect why it is reasonable they would want to receive the letter.  Consider how often you throw something away because it doesn’t look relevant to you and you can imagine how such a statement would pause your hand before getting to the trash bin.

My request today comes with a note of urgency. As our behavioral science section states:

“A sense of urgency signals the relative importance of a task, tackles our procrastination and motivates us to act. Deadlines are often used to signal urgency but they might backfire. Long deadlines give permission to procrastinate and a chance to forget about it. Short deadlines increase responses immediately but no responses come in after it’s passed.”

This aims for the best of both worlds.  Baby 2.0 says it’s urgent – any delay will prevent it from helping people walk again.  But there’s no artificial deadline that would cut off a potential long tail for this mail piece.

Restating the offer in the P.S. Not only is it a specific offer (your five pounds goes to fund PhD students), but the A.I. knows that people read postscripts to letters more than the letter.  So it uses the P.S. to give the short version of the full pitch.  I was looking for an Agitator post to link to that shows the research on this, but instead I found we’d used P.S.s in our Agitator posts at least 363 times over the years.  Why? Because people read the P.S.

So while you may not be out of a job soon, you might want to take some behavioral science cues and put them in your work.  Otherwise, you may come in to work one day and find Baby 4.1 virtually sitting where you used to.

Nick

P.S. See, I told you people read postscripts!  For more about these and other behavioral science tactics, Lauren Merrill from Catholic Relief Services and Dr. Kiki Koutmeridou are doing a free webinar called Beyond the Nudge: Putting Deep Behavioral Insights to Work for You.  It’s June 11 at noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific.  Hope to see you there!