Jeff Brooks blogging at Future Fundraising Now is always making fun of research.

To Jeff, research is a distraction from the real world — that is, the world in which individuals make actual donations (or don’t make them) in response to identifiable stimuli (e.g. specific letters, emails, calls), which behavior can then be tracked, measured, analyzed and fairly accurately relied upon for future fundraising planning and executions.

Now, I endorse wholeheartedly in the ‘real world’ focus that Jeff always brings us back to.

But that said, I do confess to a soft spot in my heart for research — surveys, focus groups and the like. To me it’s more a question of keeping the ‘insights’ gained from such research in perspective. The value of research is that it helps you formulate reasonable marketing hypotheses that you can then subject to real world testing.

So, when I read Jeff’s recent post titled, Researchers also discovered that water is wet, I thought … there goes Jeff’s again, warning everyone that research sucks and is not to be trusted.

This time, however, what was ‘discovered’ by the research that drew his ridicule was the notion that when it comes to charitable giving, people respond to their immediate emotions!

I was so stunned myself by this breathless discovery that I decided to look deeper into the research. There must be something Jeff and I are missing, I thought. Something deep and penetrating that mere fundraisers have overlooked.

The research was conducted at the “Emotion, Decisions, Judgment and Intuition Lab” at the University of Colorado (Boulder) and published in the learned journal, Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes (July 2011).

That all sounds pretty damn authoritative. However, I read the abstract, and simply could not bring myself to fork over the $31.50 they wanted for access to the full article … even using Roger’s credit card.

Says the author of the study: “There’s a lot of wisdom in facilitating immediate action from the point of view of understanding human psychology and getting people to respond when their emotions are most intense.” Yep.

And then: “…but we found that giving people time to collect their thoughts completely erases this immediacy effect.” Uh Huh.

That’s it, folks.

Although it pains me, I have to concede to Jeff  … yes, there’s a heap of useless research out there. Be especially aware of research that’s not linked in some manner to transactional data or that doesn’t point you toward a testable fundraising hypothesis.

Tom