Are you in the behavior business?  Your fundraising team probably says they are while your program staff is more likely to be acting like it.

There’s a growing paradox in charitable organizations: program teams are embracing behavioral science to tackle big, intractable problems, while fundraisers mostly stick to describing donor behavior—maybe predicting it occasionally.

But understanding why people act the way they do? That’s the real frontier. And the corporate world is already there.  Companies aren’t just dabbling in behavioral science; they’re building in-house expertise and elevating it to the C-suite.

Bloomberg predicts the top jobs of the next decade will be behavioral scientists and data analysts. Just in the past few days, here are some real job postings:

• Bank of America – Behavioral Finance Analyst
• Google/Bon Appetit – Director of Food Choice Architecture
• Capital One – Head of Talent Strategy & Behavioral Science
• Allstate – Expert Behavioral Scientist
• U.S. Bank – Behavioral Scientist
• Rare – Behavioral Scientist, Content Advertising

And here’s a snippet from one of their job listings:

• Expert-level knowledge of behavioral science, psychology, behavioral economics, and marketing. Ability to analyze real-world problems, communicate insights to non-experts, and design interventions that drive action.
• Communicating concepts from the behavioral sciences in clear tangible ways, demonstrating their applicability and making acting on them accessible to a non-expert audience;
• Designing and executing secondary research to synthesize primary literature for non-expert audience;
• Designing and executing experimental and quasi-experimental research to estimate the causal impact of interventions on psychological and behavioral outcomes;
• Collaborating in a partner-facing role as a topic expert, involving carefully listening to interpret and understand key questions, and communicating to not only to convey expertise but to advance project objectives;

Which company posted this?   Extra credit for saying DonorVoice…

The irony is it’s from Rare, which is a nonprofit helping nonprofits but only on the program side, not fundraising.  The United Nations is all-in on applying behavioral science to program work, nary a mention of fundraising in their voluminous documents.  The private sector is betting heavily on understanding why people do what they do.

Yet fundraising is still largely stuck in the “describe and predict” phase, treating donor behavior as a numbers game rather than a science.

Hiring vs. Outsourcing: What’s the Right Move?

If behavior is central to both fundraising and programs, does your team need to hire its own behavioral science expert? Maybe.

But before adding another staff position or outsourcing, ask this: Are you hiring for true expertise, or just more arms and legs?  If an agency is only doing what you could do in-house given more time, that’s the wrong agency.   Hiring external partners should be about extending your capabilities—not just offloading tasks.

The right partner should be a force multiplier—bringing deeper insights, proven models, and fresh perspectives that accelerate your work.

If you’re in fundraising, you’re in the behavior business. The question is:

• Are you treating donor behavior as something to measure…or something to understand?
• Are you still relying on volume-based tactics…or adapting to a world where engagement is about psychology, not just transactions?
• Are you hiring (or outsourcing) in a way that makes behavioral science a core competency?

Kevin