Here’s an interesting — but perhaps, DUH! — item from Neuromarketing about ‘choice fatigue‘.

People get tired of making choices … and this shows up in a variety of ways if they’re asked to keep on choosing. In one study, researchers found that items placed farther down voting ballots drew less votes (i.e., more abstentions). Other studies show that the ‘fatigued’ chooser will begin to opt for the status quo, or the simplest, most familiar response. Not a good thing for a marketer if you’re selling ‘new’ or trying to overcome inertia.

Some fundraising thoughts occur.

Your donor gets home after a long day of decision-making, and is confronted by a pile of mail, including your latest appeal. How many choices does she need to make before deciding to give you a contribution? Maybe this is why reply cards are so critical in mail packages … if well constructed, they allow the motivated donor to cut to the chase!

Similarly, experience shows that placing response buttons throughout an email appeal, including at the beginning, will increase response … with many readers responding at the first opportunity.

Now, you might view this as more a matter of the donor merely avoiding reading something they think they already know, or don’t need to be persuaded of … as opposed to an issue of too many choices. But I tend to look at it as giving the prospect the opportunity to readily make the only choice that counts!

Going back to the reply card (or donation landing page), a more conventional example of too much choice is exactly that … too many giving options. Too many suggested amounts in the dollar string. Too many ‘classes’ of giving. Too many programmatic targeting options. Too many questions unrelated to the immediate ask.

Too many choices can be more than tiresome; they can be simply confusing. Either way, the donor freezes.

A balance must be struck between offering choices that provide convenience to the donor (e.g., give by check or credit card) and those that begin to paralyze decision-making (e.g., a plethora of targeting choices, each painstakingly explained).

A fundraising appeal, at bottom, requires the donor to make one choice — to do something rather than nothing. Reconsider anything in your response device that distracts your donor from making that most fundamental choice.

Tom