Selling Nuts To Squirrels
Here’s a gem from marketing guru Seth Godin. In Selling Nuts To Squirrels, he argues that “most organizations shouldn’t try to change the worldview of the audience they’re marketing to.”
‘Worldview’ as interpreted by Godin affects three critical things in the marketing equation:
“… attention, bias and vernacular. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we’ve decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate with people differently based on their worldview.”
And as he notes: “It’s extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to change someone’s worldview.”
Godin triggers two thoughts for me.
The first involves nonprofits and their fundraising messages. If you really know your target audience well, you can make sure your message resonates with their worldview. And you can find and target — and more successfully convert — prospects who share that worldview. Indeed, in the direct mail world, that’s what is supposed to drive list selection.
The only Plan B — a sorry substitute and workable, if at all, only if you have heaps of resources — is to throw your message out to masses of people, in hopes that enough who do share your organization’s worldview will spot you and respond. Almost no nonprofit has the resources to successfully employ Plan B.
So, how accurately can you describe the worldview of your prototypical donor? And how well and consistently do your communications match up against that worldview?
The other thought involves fundraising consultants. I’ll turn to that one tomorrow.
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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