Storytelling Vs. Data. Which Is More Important?
Looking for something to debate over lunch today?
Check out Nick Ellinger’s post over at the DonorVoice Blog, where he tackles the age-old debate over the power of storytelling versus data when it comes to fundraising success.
Challenging a common thesis that that Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election because they focused on data-driven marketing, rather than traditional storytelling and narrative.
What do you think?
Before you send your egg salad sandwich sailing across the lunchroom toward a disagreeing colleague, here’s the Spoiler Alert: According to Nick, storytelling vs. data is “a false choice faced often by marketers. We don’t need data over stories or stories over data – we need the two of them working together.”
Drawing on behavioral science, Nick notes when you look at science, narratives are an important part of why we believe things and why we give. “Specifically, when people empathize with a story, they have 47% higher oxytocin levels and oxytocin leads to greater giving. In fact, when we see vivid imagery in a narrative, our brain processes it as if it is a visual and motor experience – almost as though it happened to you.”
Ergo: storytelling is important, even to cold-hearted numbers folks like Nick.
BUT … Storytelling alone is not enough. We also need data to know what story to tell.
For example, according to Nick, “when you sign up for the ASPCA newsletter, they ask you to fill out a survey. One of the questions on that survey is whether you are a cat or dog person. They then use that information to customize the pictures they show you and the stories they tell. This simple differentiator is the first line of customization and segmentation for ASPCA and it allows them to tell stories that their donors and prospective donors will care about.”
Of course, every nonprofit has these differences. But how many organizations really put the power of these differences to work?
Not many, according to Nick. “Of the nonprofits we secret shopped, fewer than a quarter asked about any topic preferences and only 6% asked for any attributes about the donor or the donor’s connections to the cause. That means that for most people for most organizations a new subscriber is nothing more than a name and contact info,” says an incensed Nick.
Nick advises that preference and donor identity data not only helps the nonprofit determine which story goes to which donor, it also informs you what stories are worth telling. “By analyzing what causes people to commit to organization XXX, you can use just the ones that you know will work for your audience.”
“Each person we serve as a nonprofit is a story waiting to happen,” says Nick.
Don’t fall into the “Either/Or Trap” warns Nick. “Data without storytelling gives you insight, but no way to practice it; storytelling without data ends up telling a great yarn to people who don’t care.”
Are you among minority of fundraisers who seek your donors’ preferences and attributes and use them to inform the stories you tell?
Roger
P.S. DonorVoice will be releasing their full Secret Shopping study shortly. If you’d like to be among the first to receive it just sign up here.
5 responses to “Storytelling Vs. Data. Which Is More Important?”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m wondering how people about sign-up form preferences for segmentation vs using behaviour and testing to do it.
To take the dog/cat example, they could have removed that question and had an email that asked them to click a dog image/content or a cat image/content and then segmented on-wards. To me this seems a little cleverer and streamlines the sign-up form, but of course it means not everyone will respond so you won’t have the data on everybody.
I’d love to know any thoughts or links that look into the pros/cons of these two approaches. Is the answer to do both?
Quite correct. This is a trick question. Don’t fall for the tyranny of the “or” as most things are an “and” approach.
Excellent question, Simon. Behavioral segmentation is certainly better than nothing and, because you won’t get everyone to take a survey or tell you preferences, can be highly valuable. There are, however, three big advantages to explicit statements of identity and preference when you can get them:
1. You can play them back to the person. When someone has said they are a dog person, you can have a line in an email or a mail piece that says “Because you are a dog person, you might be interested in…” Even a simple line like this can show the person that you know and care about who they are and thus increase engagement and response. Since it’s a bit creepy to say “you are a dog person” to a person who hasn’t volunteered that information, this is a nice boost to engagement.
2. There are things that are much more difficult to get implicitly than explicitly. While the cat v dog one is fairly easy, something like connection to a disease is far more difficult. For example, you can ask why someone is donating – is it because they themselves or someone they love has cancer? But any way to divine this implicitly (e.g., going to patient resources) is going to be a crude measure. Since for many charities, their key differentiating factor is a bit more difficult, explicit works best.
3. Explicit statements tend to be less changing over time. For example, if someone is a dog person, but the cat picture you put up reminds them of Snickerdoodle, the cat they had when they were eight, they may give you an answer that reflects their thinking at that moment, but not how they will react over the long term. With an explicit question, however, someone is thinking about who they are as a person rather than who they are in that moment.
It’s true that implicit assumptions are getting better and better over time, but there’s unlikely to be a substitute for asking people for these reasons even in the long term. So, yes, I’d say do both — ask explicitly first and foremost, then fill in with implicit assumptions when you aren’t able to get explicit feedback.
Very timely post for me. I’ll be presenting with Jeff Kost of Capital Caring and Sara Rycroft from Greenpeace on this very topic at the DMA Washington Nonprofit Conference next Friday. Come see us Friday at 2 pm. I couldn’t agree more that the very best fundraising communications appeal to people’s hearts and heads!
Let’s not confuse (1) combining data with storytelling in order to persuade in a fundraising appeal with (2) using data you collect about your constituents to inform and target that story-dominated appeal.
Compelling research done by Paul Slovic in 2007 shows that storytelling alone beats combining a story with data .This was a study done for Save the Children. The researchers called this the “drop in the bucket effect”. People were moved by an individual child’s story. Then, when they read the numbers of children like this individual who needed help, they just felt overwhelmed by the scope of the problem. So they gave less. I wrote about this here: http://clairification.com/2012/05/06/one-incredibly-dramatic-way-to-create-winning-content/