There is a famous study in nonprofit marketing showing that an appeal that tells the story of a child does better than an appeal that tells that same story with information about the general problem of poverty in Africa.

Even more oddly, a story of one boy did as well as the story of one girl; and both did better than the story of the boy and the girl. The study is here; it is both fascinating and disheartening.

We humans think in simple narrative. We are used to hearing a story of a person (then using availability bias, which we talked about, to generalize). When we hear the story of a person, we react to it with emotion and affect. When we hear the story of many people, we react to it with logic and calculation. Or as Stalin put it: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”

Credit to thersa.org for the image

This is called scope insensitivity.  People donate relatively the same amount to save 2,000, 20,000, and 200,000 birds.  In 2010, the humanitarian aid response to the Haiti earthquake (which affected 3 million people) was more than 3 billion dollars. The flood in Pakistan (which affected an estimated 20 million people) received only 2.2 billion dollars. (study here)  And we’re similar bad rendering money, but that’s a separate blog post with its own problems and solutions.

The rule you could get from this is to tell only one story at a time.  Which is not a bad rule.  If you want to quit this post  now, with that one rule, fine by us.

Yet the problems we address are not just of one boy or one girl.  Nor should they be – for large problems, someone must fix the cause, not just the effect.  You want to help one person, then another, then another, etc., until your problem is solved and you can take up golf or something.  We deal with the thousands, millions, and billions.

So how do you tell epic stories but make the numbers manageable?  Apply your reality distortion field:

Bring large numbers down to the one.  We’ve recently seen two tests using  of our DonorVoice Pre-Test Tools where statistics did as well as an individual victim’s story.  What gives?

In both cases, the winning statistics were brought down to a unit – one in six children or one in 11 adults has this disease or goes hungry at night.  Instead of 11 million this and 19 million that, they brought down the statistics to the level than an individual person could make a difference.  And that makes a difference.  People don’t have a fixed number in their head of people who need to be affected by a problem before they will donate.  Rather, they want a problem they can take a bite out of.

There’s a historical example of this: during the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russians broadcast the message that “every seven seconds, a German soldier dies in Russia” in German.  The goal was not for Germans to get a full scope of the problem; it was to get the message across (that message being “RUN!!!”).  “Every seven seconds” tells this in a way that 388,000 people dying each month does not.

Similarly, when MADD talks about the cost of drunk driving, the amount they focus on  is usually not the billions of dollars; it’s $500 for every adult in the United States.  Everyone can picture $500 or what they could buy with it – its individualized.  Whereas we don’t know where to start with a billion dollars.

Actually, I do — with a vintage battleship gray Aston Martin DB5 — but that’s only a start.

Unit asking.  The method is simple: before asking how much a person would give to support a group of needy people, ask how much the person would give to support one needy person.  This mental anchor of an individual person helps the scope of your program work for you instead against.

Researchers first asked people how much they would donate to help 20 children in need.  Half of the audience had a preceding question:

“Before you decide how much to donate to help these 20 children, please first think about one such child and answer a hypothetical question: How much would you donate to help this one child? Please indicate the amount here: $____.”

People who got this priming question expressed a willingness to donate more than twice as much as the control group ($49 versus $18).

Then, they worked with a company in China that was raising money among its 800 employees to help 40 school children in the Sichuan province, which had just gone through an earthquake.  The company emailed its employees, half with a unit ask, half without.  Average gifts went up 65% among those asked to envision what they would give to support one child first.  Additionally, response rate was unaffected.

They then tested the wording in the mail, with even bigger results — those who received the single unit ask first had gifts that were four to five times higher than those who received a plea for the 40 children alone.

Would you like additional tips like these?  We are working on a new feature called Ask a Behavioural Scientist.  If you have questions about how to nudge your donors (or bosses) in the right direction, ask away in the comments!

Nick