Why do we care about donor service?  Let’s delve into our donors’ brains to find out.

You!  Put down that hacksaw!  I was speaking metaphorically!

Picture any decision you make as a debate between “pull towards” and “push away.”  The pull comes from our nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens – think of this as your buy button – quantifies how much benefit or pleasure you are going to get from a decision.  fMRI data show us that when someone gives to charity, the nucleus accumbens lights up and produces dopamine.

OK, what’s dopamine?  Dopamine is what’s called a neurotransmitter.  Nerve cells (neurons) release neurotransmitters to send messages to other nerve cells.  In this case, it’s a happy Wells-Fargo-wagon-is-a-comin’-down-the-street message.  Think of the classic rat-pushes-a-lever-and-gets-a-reward-experiment.  That’s what dopamine does.  Do good, get a dopamine reward.  Most addictive drugs work through dopamine and most anti-addictive medicinal treatments repress dopamine.

There are case studies of people who are addicted to giving because of their neural pathways (including this very readable one from The Atlantic).

Part of why dopamine is addictive is that the brain tends to anticipate it.  And you don’t want to deny someone that hit of dopamine for their good deeds.  Conversely, an unexpected reward can have the same impact that unexpected flowers or a gift can have for a spouse or loved one.  No, not the “wondering what you did wrong” one — the good one.  This activity happens in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the reward pathway.  Activity here increases when there’s an unexpected gain.

Dopamine dulls pain, arouses, and causes pleasure.  As a result, it’s a pretty nice thing to have on your side, flowing through your donors’ nucleus accumbens.

So that’s the pull.  Pushing against this are the insula and the amygdala.  The insula is mostly about negative sensory experiences, so aren’t as interesting for us.  What we’re worried about is the amygdala (especially the right hemisphere).  The right amygdala processes fear-inducting stimuli.  It also hosts memory for things with emotional properties.

And when I say fear, I don’t just mean “BEAR!”-type fears that make you wish you’d worn your brown pants.  This is fear of any potential downside from “I’m afraid that this donation won’t make to the intended recipient” to “I’m afraid I will lose my mental faculties and be rejected by society, set adrift to die scared and alone.”

In the interest of illustrating scope, that last may be more of a peer into my amygdala that you wished…

Anywho, these push impulses also impact the OFC (orbital frontal cortex).  Remember when I said unexpected gains like giving flowers help the OFC ?  Well, this activity also decreases when there isn’t an expected gain – e.g., a donor doesn’t get thanked for her/his gift.  Moreover, it really craters when there is an unexpected loss.  Unexpected losses hurt activity far more than unexpected gains of the same size.

Thus, if you were trying to repel a donor, the best things you could do are withhold the things they feel are their due and hit them with unexpected negative experiences.  The outcome of the  battle royale in our brains over negative vs positive is pre loaded to favor the negative : the “push away” of the amygdala has a hardwired advantage over the “pull towards” of dopamine and the nucleus accumbens.

This makes sense given how we evolved.  The upside of “tasty berry!” is far lower than the downside of “poisoned berry!” and evolution rewarded people who made that calculus with survival.

Our donor services, then, are the tool we use to even the odds.  When donor services fix issues, the amygdala’s negative response is softened. We should always aim to do it well enough to create unexpected surprises, arming the OFC for the next fight against the negative pushers.  And donor services help you see around corners to prevent the next dopamine-crushing, OFC-depressing, amygdala-retaining emotional negative experience that can turn a donor off you for good.

Nick