We’ve written extensively about the Big Five of Personality psychology and how to measure Personality and use it to tailor messaging to get beyond the unsatisfying world of one-size-fits-all. ( See here, here and here.)

Importance of Personality

Why Personality?   It predicts health, morbidity, occupation, entrepreneurship rates, innovation, political values, regional stereotypes, income inequality and economic behavior.

Take a moment and re-read that list of outcomes.  Personality is part of our chemical and biological makeup and helps explain many of life’s important choices and outcomes.

How in the world can we claim to be donor-centric or doing our marketing and fundraising in an optimal way if we don’t factor in such a foundational piece of human decision making?

Guess what else Personality helps explain?  Our geographic tribe.  Birds of a feather.  I find this fascinating but maybe that’s just my Personality talking.

This is geo-mapping of the Big Five.  More blue means ‘colder’ or less of that given trait, the more orange the higher people in that location score on a given trait.

Geography as Useful Proxy for Personality

Geography is just one of many proxy attributes we use to find our Personality segments.  But, it’s a very useful ingredient in scoring up your acquisition list and house file with Personality membership.  We’ll have more to say and offer on this as a commercial opportunity for interested agencies and charities but until then, you’d do a lot worse than state based targeting to send an appeal versioned with Conscientious messaging (e.g. hard work, rigor, discipline, loyalty, focus, commitment) to some of those deep south states that are likely under-represented on many donor files.

Here are a few other observations,

1. The Deep South and parts of the Midwest, but only parts, are in fact more pleasant, nicer (Agreeable) than the NorthEast and most of the mountain time zone.  People in these Agreeable areas are hard-wired to help.
2. An agreeable message to the Deep South is worth doing but so is a Conscientious one and those two appeals are very different.
3. International relief charities should naturally have more donors from the high Openness areas as those folks are hard-wired to appreciate abstraction and more complex propositions.
4. Texas is a much more nuanced, complicated Personality state than common political or social stereotypes might suggest.  There is extreme introversion and extroversion for example.

As a final aside, the mapping done here uses a spatial technique that largely avoids the limiting, overly simplistic reliance on legal geo-boundaries such as zip code, county or state designations.  It is a clustering of sorts that calculates Personality scores and distance from geo-centers.

Said differently, the coloring of Texas is based on all US residents, not just those living in the state.  This produces a smoothing effect and more importantly, allows some of these nuanced patterns to emerge.

Kevin