I was struck, again, at how behavioral science is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the nonprofit world.

If you look at the program side of our sector you’ll see lots of examples of behavioral science at work.  Hell, the UN has a behavioral science committee and a working group and a subcommittee and a steering committee and a team plus a team to help that team.

They think behavioral science can help with refugee inclusion, progress for women and girls, peace and security, health equity and even resilience of the aviation sector, whatever the hell that means.

I see it everywhere on the program side.  See what’s missing from the UN’s 2022 Behavioral Science Week?  There’s not a single, solitary session on using behavioral science to improve the donor side of your business.

You can apparently ask people to donate to help women and girls and then use behavioral science to optimally spend the donor money to help women and girls.

But, apparently it never dawned on anyone at the UN that it might be useful to apply this thinking to the asking part.

Here is the (partial) UN definition of behavioral science: an evidence based understanding of how people behave and make decisions…

I don’t care for the definition but even still, I can’t help but think fundraising squarely fits into it.

Here is my “fundraising meets Behavioral Science” non-wikipedia, wikipedia entry:

• People only give and keep giving if they feel good about the decision.
• One of the best ways to make a person feel good about the decision is showing that giving is in keeping with who they are on the inside, their values and goals.
• Not all people have the same values and goals, therefore you cannot have behavioral science + fundraising if you operate in a one-size-fits-nobody world.
• Behavioral science is 10% biases and nudges and 90% understanding these different values and goals.

The UN gets behavioral science wrong in two major ways,

• Making it all about biases and nudges and,
• treating biases as universal or global.  They are not.  Nudges affect different people differently.

But, the UN does get an A for effort, for raising awareness and prioritizing a digging deeper approach.

Ask yourself this:  what is your grade for applying behavioral science to fundraising?

And more importantly, ask yourself which of your donors don’t deserve to feel good about their decision to support you?

If you reflexively said ‘none’ then that is your imperative to reset expectations and bare minimums in your fundraising operation.  It’s time to make our fundraising as human and fulfilling as our program work.

Kevin