“It is not enough to be loved — I wish to be preferred” – Andre Gide, playwright

It would be wonderful for you if all your donors gave only to your organization.  Rationally, they should.  They would look at all the organizations out there, pick the one with the biggest impact for the buck, and give everything they plan to give.*

Why don’t people do this?

There are two hypotheses why we give: that we want to do good in the world and we want the feeling doing good in the world.  Often, these go together, but consider whether you would rather to give to an efficient organization who doesn’t make you feel your own personal impact versus a slightly less efficient one who does.  That conflict is often present in thinking about giving.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.  Harbaugh, Mayr, and Burghart studied the difference between give and take.   That is, they looked at how much enjoyment people got out of paying a tax that they knew would go to a positive end versus freely donating the same amount.  It turned out they liked having a positive impact either way, but they preferred to donate than to be taxed.  Donors wanted to be the hero of the story.

This all happened at the neural level.  So, despite some scholars separating us into emotional altruists (bleeding hearts) and effective altruists (Spocks), we all live somewhere between wanting good to be done for its own sake and wanting the feeling of being the instrument of good.  (There’s also a component that varies greatly by charity of giving prompted by the benefits given by the nonprofit for the donation.)

Russ Reid’s Heart of the Donor survey indicates that the average donor gives to six different nonprofits.  A similar study by Apogee found that donors had given to three charities in the past year and 10 over their lifetime.  Further, at least ten percent of ten different organizations past-two-years donors donated to at least six other categories.

To some extent, we must accept this fickleness as the price of doing business with humans.  Coke is a company that has customers so loyal that the one time it messed with its formula over three decades ago is still synonymous with “marketing failure.”  Yet 72% of Coke customers also buy Pepsi.

As a result, Coke is not trying to get people to drink more liquids.  Coke drives for “share of throat” – how much of what you drink can Coke own?  By using this metric, they know if they can increase your loyalty and experience, they can increase their revenue (with you still not giving them your unswerving obedience).

The same is true for us.  From in-depth interviews with donors, researchers find that donors have a mental budget for their philanthropy.  (Interestingly, these often cluster around 10% of income as is prescribed by several different religions.)  Like any mental budget, it’s allocated in amount, in timing, and in beneficiaries and the allocation is only moderately malleable.

Our donors are good people who do good things in the plural sense.  Almost all of them support multiple causes and organizations.  That’s fine.  What we want to be able to do is create an experience for that donor that makes them want to give us more “share of donations” than other nonprofits.

We must accept that our donors will be promiscuously charitable.  Personally, I’ve been impacted by or had family and friends impacted by Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, depression, fertility issues, heart disease, kidney disease, MS, sexual assault, suicide, and more.  As a donor, I have ties to each of these causes and spread my giving among them.

Further, each of these issues waxes and wanes in the donor’s mind as the issue changes importance.  If there is a disaster, friend’s diagnosis, crisis of faith, presidential tweet, etc. that triggers a donor, s/he could need to donate right now as a way of processing emotion.  Roger Craver just did an interesting piece at the Agitator about the reactive giving.

Conversely, if a person’s connection to an issue came through your college roommate you last saw at the reunion four years ago, the issue likely diminishes in importance.

That is why we preach adapting to the donor’s identity – their why for giving.  It is the core of how you differentiate yourself from your fellow nonprofits.  It is how you get to be preferred.

You save lives?  You change lives?  So does everyone else.

You save the lives of the people I care about?  You change lives around the issue that I feel in my heart?  Tell me more.

* Actually, if we were fully rational utility maximizers as envisioned by sophomore econ, the idea that you would send a check to help anyone else is laughable.  Some of these people helped don’t even share your genetic material!  But asking classical economists to predict human behavior is likely trying to figure out how many people fit in a room and assuming all the people are cubes – you’ll get an answer, but the assumptions are flawed.