When “Help Them” Needs a Little “This Matters to You”
Most fundraising assumes the donor opens the appeal as a fully assembled human being – alert, reflective, morally cued up and sitting in a sunlit breakfast nook, perhaps with herbal tea, considering the human condition.
The more likely scenario is skimming your email between a Slack message, a pharmacy refill reminder and a child asking where the blue hoodie is.
The externalities of life have a huge influence over your response rate. And so, when a research finding helps us steer into this headwind better, it’s worth noting.
A study tested whether people who were mentally depleted responded differently to appeals framed around the beneficiary versus the donor’s own benefit.
The beneficiary benefit message is our standard fare – e.g. Help them. Save people’s lives.
The self-benefit message shifts the spotlight e.g., Help yourself. Donate now and feel good.
In the cleanest version of the experiment, the ad image and body copy were the same. The only meaningful change was the headline and subhead. One version said, “Your donation can help Maria.” The other said, “Your donation can help you.” One said Maria deserves happiness. The other said you do.
What’d they find?
- When people are mentally worn out from their day the self-benefit messages worked better.
- When people are feeling alive and ready to tackle life the beneficiary-focused message tended to work better.
Guess what time of day tends to correspond with each state of mental alertness? Yeah, evening’s the battery is empty, mornings the opposite. I get it, the world is not a kitchen timer and a retired donor at 8 p.m. may be relaxed and reflective while a working parent at 7:45 a.m. may be negotiating peace treaties over cereal.
But time of day is a proxy and still useful. So, yeah, I’d recommend testing changing up the other vs. self digital ads and emails to to match time of day and the likelihood of being mentally spent or not.
And you don’t need to over-polish the self-benefit version into an affirming therapy treatment but there is in-market evidence from us and others that the “donate now and feel good” language works.
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
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