Psychology

When does a match light a flame?

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We’ve talked about how a lead donation can be as or more effective than a matching gift campaign and how using a lead donation can also calm the overhead related concerns of donors.  

From that, it may sound like I’m anti-match.

 

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(insert Lalo Schifrin score here:
BUM BUM BABA
BUM BUM BABA
WAHNAHNAAAH WAHNAHNAAAH etc.)

But I’m not.  It’s a widely used tool that I’ve found to be effective in several cases and, unlike most tactics, the donors I talk to also seem to enjoy matching campaigns.

Some research can help shed some light on when to use a match and when not to.  Karlan, List, and Shafir published a study in the Journal of Public Economics (and who doesn’t pick that up for a little beach reading over the summer) looking at match rates.  

Normal studies tend to focus on whether the match works overall: yes it does or no it doesn’t.  This study, however, gives some guidance on when to deploy a match.  It also cross-deployed the match with a test of urgency, which is one of the building blocks of influence.

So there were four test conditions:

  • Matching gift with urgency (with a reply device and PS that said things like “NOW IS THE TIME TO JOIN THE FIGHT!”; you can tell it’s urgent because it’s in ALL CAPS!).
  • Matching gift without urgency
  • Control with urgency
  • Control without urgency

And they did a bunch of other stuff also that is not relevant for our purposes here, including testing different match sizes and timings and such.

The authors found that urgency actually hurt the appeal in many cases (probably, they hypothesize, because there was no particular reason given for the urgency; when it was combined with a match deadline, this negative effect disappeared).

As for the matching gift, there was evidence that it worked, but it only worked for donors who had made their previous gift in the past year.  These donors were 3.2% more likely to donate with a match in place and their average gift went up.  On the flip side, donors who had last given more than 12 months prior had their response rate drop when the match condition was in place.

I mentioned earlier that the donors with whom I spoke seemed to like the tactic and that seems to be supported by this study: active donors do like a match.  However, it seems to bump into trouble when the person has not donated reanecdotalcently.

There’s likely one exception to this (and this is based only on anecdotal evidence, so take this with an appropriate-sized amount of salt).

I have found that people who have given to a match before are more likely to give to a match again.  Thus, if you are suppressing out 13+ month donors from your match campaign, I’d counsel you to leave the ones who have shown the tactic has worked for them.

Want more studies and analysis like this?  Please sign up for my free enewsletter.

When does a match light a flame?

Ask strings and $100: It’s all about the Benjamins, maybe

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I, like many, am currently obsessed with Hamilton despite the minor handicap of not having seen it or likely being able to see it in the near future.  (Not shockingly, the idea of someone writing like they’re running out of time appeals to me.)  But the Founding Father most relevant to our work is still likely Ben Franklin.

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Do not reproduce.

In nonprofit work, we tend to view the $100 level as a bit magical.  Once someone makes the psychological jump to three figures, they are likely weighing the effectiveness of your nonprofit and not just the emotion.  Additionally, when someone is giving in the same number of digits, it’s easier to upgrade.  That is, the jump from $100 to $200 seems easier for donors to make than $50 to $100, even though it’s more money to increase.  And $100 donors in acquisition are instant candidates for high-touch treatment, as they are showing significant support of your organization from the start.

There’s a lesser known place where $100 is magic: in your ask string.

Reiley and Samek did a study in which they tried two different ask strings). The first was $35, $50, $75, $95, $250, and other.  The second was the same as the first, but with $100 swapped in for the $95.

Revenue per solicitation went up 29%.  Average gift went up almost 20% and response rate went up 7.6%.  Let me repeat that: the ask string with the higher gift amount in it also had a higher response rate.  This is a rare thing.

The major reason for this, they hypothesize (and I agree), is fluency.  As I wrote in the piece on word choice:

People tend to prefer things, people, objects, etc. that are easy for them to understand. (study here). This is known as the fluency bias. There’s a reason that only eight names cover more than half of our presidents (James, John, William, George, Thomas, Andrew, and Franklin (which used to be a lot more popular than it is now)). Names that are more common help people rise faster in occupations. Believe it or not, stocks that have ticker symbols that can be pronounced as words outperform stocks that can’t be.

So, you would think logically that $100 isn’t the only fluent number.  And you would be right.  Another study looked at whether people were more likely to give $20 or a strange amount like $20.03 (if they graduated from the college in question in 2003).  People were less likely to give the strange amount (although this was not statistically significant at the .05 level).

So remember to create round numbers in your ask strings unless you have a really good reason to: the ease of recognizing and using these amounts will benefit your organization and get you more of those elusive Benjamins.

When you can, see if you can get the $100 into your ask string.  It increases your response rate with no loss in average gifts.  Wins like that don’t come along every day.

 

I’m working on a book on ask strings.  My goal is to make it free to subscribers of my newsletter here.  So if a round-up of the science and psychology of donation amounts sounds interesting, please sign up today.

PPS. Tomorrow would also be fine, as I won’t be done with the book tomorrow, but that lacks urgency, don’t you think?

 

 

Ask strings and $100: It’s all about the Benjamins, maybe

Building awareness versus actually doing something

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OK, that headline is harsher than I meant it.  Awareness is a necessary and useful precondition for many nonprofits.  Using an example I know well, drunk driving was a late-night joke just a few decades ago.  It took awareness activities to alert a nation to the fact that it is an unnecessary, tragic, and violent crime.

But does raising awareness sell?  That is, do people want to donate money to raise awareness about an issue or organization?  Or do they want to fund efforts to remediate wrongs directly?  Robert Smith and Norbert Schwarz wanted to find out.

Actually, being good scientists, they wanted to analyze donor’s metacognition about awareness activities vis-à-vis whether the cause was already in the donor consideration set.  Which means the same thing when you translate it into English.

They found three major things:

  • When people knew more about a charity and its work, they were more likely to donate to it and the more they were likely to donate.  The researchers actually manipulated this knowledge in a cool way. They asked subjects questions about what they had read about a charity, but there were two sets of questions: an easy one and a hard one.  The people who got the easy set of questions and thus thought they knew more about the subject were more likely to donate.
  • This result reversed when the charity was engaging in awareness activities.  That is, if people thought they knew all about the charity and its aims (that is, they got the easy questions), they were less likely to want to invest in the charity’s efforts to raise awareness.
  • Looking at actual donations (not just intent to give), people gave far more to help than to raise awareness when they knew a lot about a cause.  They gave slightly more to help raise awareness when they didn’t think they knew a lot about a cause.

This makes a good bit of sense.  If you think the average person (which people usually consider to be a slightly dumber version of themselves) knows about something, why would donate money to raise awareness?  On the flip side, if you felt there was a story that was undertold, that people needed to hear, you might ante up.

This has a major implication for nonprofits as they mature: what got you here won’t get you where you are going.  In the infancy stage of a nonprofit, it is acceptable simply to point at a problem and say “this is a problem; we need to get more people like you to acknowledge the problem.”  However, as nonprofits mature and people are aware of the issue the cause represents, it needs either to adjust its fundraising efforts to focus on what it is doing to solve the problem or to find more obscure areas of its cause to reenergize its donor base.

This also has implications for donor communications: there’s a difference between what you talk about to acquire a donor and to retain one.  That is, people who are your supporters know you and your issues (or, at least, think they do).  They don’t want to support awareness activities for things they think people already know about.  On the other hand, people who are new to your organization may be willing to chip in to help spread the word.

So remember your audience when you are pitching both helping and awareness activities for greater results.

Building awareness versus actually doing something

Time value of donations: I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a warm feeling today

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Are you ready to increase your monthly donations?  Can you wait until two months from now?

It’s time for a week of studies of nonprofit direct marketing.  This has quickly become one of the favorite types of post on the blog, so if you don’t want to miss the entries later in the week on ask strings, matching gifts, when to ask to support awareness activities and more, please sign up for my free weekly newsletter.

Today’s study comes to us from Anna Breman of the Stockholm School of Economics (it’s not actually a great school of economics, but the longer they keep you there, the more you believe it is*).

In it, she tries a unique approach to increasing monthly donations that, since the title of the paper is Give More Tomorrow, you can probably guess worked.

 

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Wimpy, Patron Saint of the Time Value of Money

The experiment takes advantage of one of those cognitive biases or heuristics we are always yammering on about (explanation of heuristics here).  In this case, being human means that you prefer immediate benefits and delayed costs.  This is why diets start tomorrow, plasma TVs trump retirement savings, and dentists ask you to commit to a time to come back rather than trusting that one day you will feel like a dentist visit.  It’s also why, in a famous experiment with children, the pull of one marshmallow now is strong even when there is a promise of two marshmallows later.

So what if you could commit future-you to making a monthly donation, but present-you doesn’t have to feel the pain?  It makes a lot of sense, given Benartzi and Thaler’s experience with a Save More Tomorrow plan that successfully asked employees to commit a portion of their future pay raises to savings.

Breman worked with a Swedish charity Diakonia** and their existing bank of monthly donors.  In one group, they asked their sustainers to increase their monthly donation now.  In the other, they asked sustainers to increase their monthly donation in two months.

The increase in donations was 32% more in the group asked to increase their donations in two months.  Part of this was an increase in average donation (19%) and part was an increase in the frequency of donation rate (11%).

And, looking back, the treatment donors were no more likely to cancel or decrease their monthly donation than the control group.  In fact, the long-run effect was slightly higher than the short-run effect.

This seems like a tactic that is easily implemented on the phone.  It would be harder online if you are using an out-of-the-box online solution.  I won’t mention any names (*cough*cough*BlackbaudLuminate*cough*cough*), but some programs are so inflexible you can’t even schedule monthly donations to be processed on a specific date each month, as is common practice for monthly donations.

While the study did not ask this question, I would also wager than donors who increased their giving months down the road were also happier with their decision as a result.  It’s quite common to have stress reactions to charitable asks (even when one wants to give) and knowing that you don’t have to give now in order to have the impact that you want could be soothing.

The next test, I would argue, for academia is whether this technique also works for monthly donor acquisition/conversion.  It would seem that the same logic would apply, but I don’t know of anyone who has tested it.

So, if you are among the bold and fortunate few, can I prevail upon you to share your experience in the comments or to email me at nick@directtodonor.com so that I might illuminate your fellow readers (and myself)?  Thanks in advance and hope you enjoyed reading.


* I just couldn’t help myself for this joke.  I apologize for that joke to you the audience, Anna Breman, the Stockholm School of Economics, any former or current hostages, the people of Stockholm and Sweden, people of Scandinavian extraction, and people who drive Volvos or have Ikea furniture.  Also to Tom Hanks.  He knows why.

** I should also apologize to Diakonia, which does really good work on sustainable development around the world.

Time value of donations: I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a warm feeling today

Imagery in nonprofit storytelling

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Picture the last time you watched a football game.  Think about a big hit that someone took to the head, whether it was a smashing tackle or someone getting upended and landing on his head.

What did you, as a spectator do?

Chances are pretty good that you cringed.  More specifically, you likely closed your eyes, turned your head from the screen, lifted your shoulders, and grimaced as if you were in pain.

And you were in pain, even though you were not in pain.  Your brain created the pain for you.  So you averted and closed off your gaze, so you wouldn’t feel any more of it.  You lifted your shoulders so as to protect your own neck.

Or, as a master of the written word put it:

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“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

There is a robust debate ongoing as to whether this happening because of so-called mirror neurons or as a result of human empathy.  A good reflection on this debate is available here.   

However you come out on this debate, suffice it to say that seeing something happen to someone else can trigger the same feeling in ourselves.  But does it translate to the written word?

Absolutely.  Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words may have simultaneously underestimated the worth of both the right picture and the right words.

Consider Hemingway’s famous challenge to write a six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”  I’ve lost a child and those six words remind me vividly and painfully of a nursery.  We painted it to look like the blue of the sky, with a bright yellow sun.  And while I, with my complete lack of art skill, resigned myself to painting clouds and blades of grass (the ugly ones that didn’t taper properly at the top), my wife painted ladybugs and flowers and butterflies to welcome our child.

But the crib remained empty.  And while we did end up having two wonderful children, we moved from that house and used a different crib.

My point here is that words can create images.  Hopefully, you pictured our nursery a little bit above.  I used (or rather, tried to use) some of the same techniques you would see in a movie:

  • Setting the stage: a nursery.
  • Using colors to evoke an image.  Without using the Pantone or paint chip name, you have in your mind the picture of the sky and of the color or the sun.
  • Showing action: it isn’t just a static room; now it’s being painted.
  • Zooming in: on blades of grass.
  • Panning around to capture detail.

Chances are you are picturing it entirely differently from how it was (heck, because of the vagaries of memory, so probably am I).  That doesn’t matter as much as look as you are seeing a scene.

Studies of the brain find that when we read a story written this way, our brain processes it as if it is a visual and motor experience. 

And we can invite people to trigger imagery.  Good verbs like “imagine,” “remember,” and “picture in your mind” give a person the trigger to help them start to think in this way.  You still have to capture them with story and detail, but you are starting well.

Imagery in nonprofit storytelling

Do do-gooders do good deeds?

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Good deeds are an odd thing.  You would normally think that a moral choice would make one more likely to follow the path of virtue in the future.  And research has shown that that when people are told they are good people, they do good things.

On the flip side, researchers describe the licensing effect — the thought that a good act gives you the license to do a bad thing and still be balanced. .  

This is well described in a New York Times piece creatively entitled “How Salad Makes Us Fat.”

Researchers tracked shopping carts and found that selecting a virtuous product make one more likely to subsequently pick a “bad” product.  

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This is your meal? Clearly, you are going to hell.

Other studies have shown that people who have eaten something indulgent are more likely to do good deeds — compensation in both directions.

How can both of these be true?  Would you rather catch your donors coming back from the gym or the Krispy Kreme?  And is it better to remind your donors that they are good people, or remind them that it’s been awhile since they last gave?

One study has worked to reconcile these in the context of donor communications.  

In the study, people were sorted into three groups.  One group was asked to write about good deeds they’d done.  A second group was asked to write about bad things they’d done.  And, not surprisingly, the third group was asked to write about neutral things.  Then they were asked whether they would like to donate a part of their fee for participating in the study to charity.

Significantly more people donated, and donated more, from the people who were asked to think of good deeds than either bad deeds or neutral things.

This is consistent with the idea that people who think of themselves as good people are more likely to do good things.  People act in relation to their self-conception.  But how does this explain moral licensing?

The study discusses this as well.  It finds that more licensing happens mostly not when we see ourselves as good or bad, but when others see us as good or bad.  For example, in the study of shopping carts discussed above, we would be judged by the person checking us out.  And if you think this doesn’t happen, you have never worked at a grocery store.

This fits with our study on slacktivism: people who did good things to help people are more likely to donate; people who did good things to get recognition as a good person are less likely to donate.

This can be well summarized in the old saw “I’m not a racist — I have plenty of friends who are [name of target group].  But…”  The person is working to establish positive external conception before saying whatever is going to follow.

(Fun fact: in the history of humankind — literally tens of thousands of years of human speech — not one thing that came after the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…” has ever been good.)

So, in an ideal world, when your donor receives your communication, they would feel like they are a good person, but feel like everyone else thought they were a bad person.  A tough balance to achieve.

I believe this comes down on the side of reminding donors not only of the good they have done in the past, but also tying it directly to the good they aimed to do.  So it would never be “you’ve given to be a part of our Founders Circle;” it would be “you’ve given to save lives and help people.”  You are telling them that they only did it to do good, not for any greater glory.

Similarly, in your lapsed communications, you would be better off establishing that clearly the donor is the type of person who gives to appeals like this one than you would be reminding them that they had lapsed.

Thus, this framing isn’t of donations like the previous few; it’s a framing of the donors that can help your appeals.

Do do-gooders do good deeds?

Validating small gifts to increase response rate

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There is an old joke that actually got turned into a Robert Redford/Demi Moore/Woody Harrelson movie.  It is potentially off-color for some readers, so if you think you might be one of those readers, skip down past the image of the movie poster below and you will be fine.

A woman goes up to a man in a bar and asks him “Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?”

The man ponders this for a moment and replies that he would.

She then asks “Well, how about for $5?”

He is shocked, retorting “What kind of a person do you think I am?”

She smiles and says “We’ve established what kind of a person you are; now we’re negotiating price.”

indecent_proposal

The lesson from the above, other than it’s less funny to read written jokes than to hear them told, is that it’s better to get someone to decide how much to donate, rather than to have them deciding whether to make a donation or not.

Researchers have found in several studies that rather than talking about a million dollars, you can have success by talking about a penny – specifically, the phrase “even a penny would help.”

This technique has some impressive results.  One study of this in a face-to-face environment increased giving from 28% to 50%.

One could argue that the success of March of Dimes in their original launch was in part a variant of this.  Although a dime meant much more then, it still was a way of giving permission to lower level gifts.

The phrase fails Kant’s categorical imperative: if everyone did it, it actually would not help.  Your penny would be eaten up by credit card fees, postage, and acknowledgments.  And I have not used this technique extensively because I’ve been worried about the anchoring effect.  My concern has been that while response rate may go up, average gift would plummet and, as a result, we’d have more lower-value donors instead of fewer high-value donors.  The former can be a strategy, but isn’t the one I’ve traditionally aimed for.

But the evidence is that people actually give significantly more than a penny.  While gift did go down on average, the total revenue from the canvass went up 64% because of the increase in response rate.

Since revenue per communication is usually a pretty good way of measuring its success (in an ideal world, you’d want to measure its impact on lifetime value, but on a one-year time horizon, you go with what you have), I would call this a win.

I would go one step further in this to say that this technique would be best combined with others to give a reason for why a penny would help.  Potentially pairs I see:

  • With membership: we want to have as many members as possible so we have the political clout to pass legislation.
  • With petitions: as we’ve seen, the humble petition can be very effective.  And the petition can make the “even a penny” part of the pitch be secondary: “please return your petition today; your voice is vital to this important issue.  And if you could also send a donation – even a penny – it would help move this issue forward even more.”
  • As a lead gift variant: I haven’t seen this tried, but you could see saying “we have a lead donor who has made a gift of $X.  We would like to report back to him/her that his/her gift inspired 50,000 other people to give.  Even a penny would…”  My thought is that, like how the matching gift variant that an additional gift would be generated for every gift made worked, this would help impact response rate positively.  If you’ve tried this, please email me at nick@directtodonor.com; I’d love to feature a case study.

Here at Direct to Donor, we don’t even need a penny; what we would love is if you would sign up for the weekly newsletter that has a digest of this type of information, plus special bonus content each week.  Thanks in advance.

Validating small gifts to increase response rate

Mental accounting and the exception expense loophole

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We’ve gone through a lot of cognitive biases recently, but one we haven’t talked about is the idea of mental accounting or budgeting.  The idea here is that dollars are fungible: your picture of a dead president and/or founding father on special paper can be exchanged for rent, coffee, donations, whatever.  In fact, money says that right on it: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.

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Image credit. Dollah dollah bills, yo.

But that’s not how we think about money.  In our minds, we have special categories for each type of expense.  Think of it as separate jars into which we are putting our invoice: $1400 for the mortgage, $800 for food, etc.  We experience mental pain every time we have to rob from one cookie jar in order to put it into another, so we try not to do it.

Picture how you think of money; it probably is something like this.  In fact, some budgeting software (we use You Need A Budget at Direct-to-Donor Manor*) formalizes this process to make sure you don’t overspend in a category.  We get comfort from knowing that each month, there is $X set aside for eating out.

Your donors think this way also.  Somewhere in their minds, there are mental Mason jars with “CHARITY” written on them.  There may even be several such jars: one for each organization they support.

If you think of how your donors mentally account, the implications ripple outward.  This is part of why:

So how do we diminish the pain that a donor feels from robbing from their “movie” or “eating out” or “savings” mental accounts to give to us?  Part of this, as mentioned previously, can be framing the gift against the frivolous.  But another technique that breaks through mental accounting is framing your ask as an exception expense.

One quirk of mental accounting is usually there is an “incidentals” budget.  This is a “what happens if my 2003 Saturn Ion** chooses to give up the ghost today” contingency fund that we can dip into.

One study changed the frame on their annual event.  Instead of talking about their walk as an annual event that happens every year, they talked about it as an event that only happens once per year.

You have to admit, there is hardly any difference between the two of these phrases (and it’s always nice to run a test that will slip unseen past your Brand Police).

Yet the results were impressive.  By running Google Adwords with the new, unique, once-per-year framing, study participants said they would participate in the exception version at a 46% rate, compared with 35% for the annual framing.  When they ran the ad for real, people were 11% more likely to click on the exception framing ad.

Similarly, in the mail:

“This mailing is part of a special charity drive that happens only once a year. Alex’s Lemonade Stand is requesting only one donation a year going forward.”

Beat:

“This mailing is part of a regular charity drive that happens annually. The charity is requesting a donation every year going forward.”

Some implications of this research:

  • This can help immensely with your event advertising (and you are trying to get your direct marketing donors to your events and vice versa, right?).  But for us, we also are testing removing things like “10th annual” from the press activities around an event.  The idea of themes could also be potent as a way of differentiating this year’s event as its own unique snowflake.
  • This could explain part of the effectiveness of techniques like a membership campaign and a better way to frame said campaign: “this is the one special time of the year we ask all supporters to make their membership gift.”
  • This may explain as to why scarcity, urgency, and uniqueness are effective persuasive levers.  It’s challenging to use this framing if you are sending four to 24 letters per year, and your donor knows that.  However, techniques that increase urgency or uniqueness like matching/lead gifts, deadlines, urgent petitions, etc. can help give a reason to open the piggy bank.

This may seem to contradict the idea of consistency – that people give to the same campaign year after year.  I would argue that they complement each other.  If you are trying to get someone to do what they’ve done before, play back their previous history and lean into the fact that you and they have a history.  If you are trying to get someone to try something new, you have to figure out for them which jar to take it out of and why.

So go forth and be unique in your messaging; it seems to be a better strategy that appealing from the tried and true.

 

* I have received no endorsement money or considerations from You Need A Budget. But I’m open to it!

** This is absolutely your author’s ride of choice.  As I mentioned in the post where I outed myself as overhead, the life of a nonprofit person should be neither Bentleys or ramen.

 

Mental accounting and the exception expense loophole

But you are free not to read this post…

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This week, we’ll talk about some framing that can help increase your donations or your likelihood of getting donations.

Some examples we’ve already covered:

  1. Framing your gift against a hedonic good works. That is, you can increase giving just by saying things like “that’s less than the cost of a Starbucks venti coffee.”
  2. Referring to something as a “small” fee can make people more likely to pay that fee. 
  3. Framing gifts in the context of social norms and social proof (e.g., circling a gift and letting people know that’s the average gift for the campaign) can increase the average gift significantly.
  4. Anchoring is just a pretty pretty frame you put around your desire to get larger gifts. 
  5. People are more likely to give to prevent losses than secure gains. 

The first one we’ll discuss this week is giving your potential donors freedom and agency.  It’s great in large part because it has a meta-analysis* behind it.

You can set up this freedom with a phrase as simple as “…but you are free to say no.”  Psychologists have a few different theories as to why this works.  One hypothesis asserts that as humans we crave control.  When someone asks us to do something (and, let’s face it, in a lot of our nonprofit communications, we lay the “why” on thick, as we should), we believe they are working to control us.  Refusal, then, is a reassertion of control.

Another hypothesis asserts that by telling someone that they are free not to do something, it feels as though we are giving them something. Reciprocity influence then demands that the donor give something in return.

I think it’s probably part of both of these, combined with a little bit of the unspoken “…but what type of person would you be?” at the end of the free to say no line.  Regardless of the exact mechanism, this technique has been shown to:

  • Increase donations face-to-face from 10% to 47.5% (study here) 
  • Increase face-to-face surveys completion from 76% to 90% (study here) 
  • Combine well with foot-in-the-door techniques (study here) 

And that meta-analysis says that the technique is effective across a variety of platforms. However, it did find that the effectiveness was slightly less in non-face-to-face ask situations; it also found that it is better if the thing you are asking a person to do (or not to do — it’s up to them!) is immediate.

So this is a technique you can add to your copy to increase donations.  If you’ve tested this, I’d love it if you can let us know your experience in the comments or at nick@directtodonor.com.  Also, if you enjoyed this, you may enjoy our weekly newsletter that covers topics like this in more detail.  But, of course, you are free to say no…

 

* A meta-analysis is research-speak for “we’re going to read all of the studies and summarize them for you in one paper.”  Think of it as the Cliff Notes if Cliff weren’t lazy and condensed all of Shakespeare down to one volume.

 

But you are free not to read this post…

What’s in a name? Word choice in direct marketing

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It is an article of faith that names have power. In Genesis 1 and 2, Adam names the animals as part of his dominion over them. Many wizards in the Potterverse dare not speak the name of Voldemort, choosing He Who Must Not Be Named instead. Shakespeare asked what was in a name and it turned out it was quite a bit, given the death toll at the end of that play. Rumplestiltskin, Isis versus Ra, Doctor Who, Bilbo in Smaug’s den, YHWH, and so on: so much of our myth and mythology is about there being power in what something is called.

The truth is that, because of nominal biases, what something is called matters. I’m cheating a bit with this topic, because this isn’t one big cognitive bias, but a few different ones. They can have an impact on your direct marketing language.

People tend to prefer things, people, objects, etc. that are easy for them to understand. (study here). This is known as the fluency bias. There’s a reason that only eight names cover more than half of our presidents (James, John, William, George, Thomas, Andrew, and Franklin (which used to be a lot more popular than it is now)). Names that are more common help people rise faster in occupations. Believe it or not, stocks that have ticker symbols that can be pronounced as words outperform stocks that can’t be. 

Our brains are more persuadable by things that are easy to read and to hear. Winston Churchill, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (and he did some other stuff), talked about how he intentionally chose words with few syllables in his speeches. As a result, they have a fluency that sticks in the mind.

Even as an American, I can easily recall more of Churchill’s rhetoric (“this was their finest hour”, “an Iron Curtain”, “we will fight them on the beaches”, “blood, toil, sweat, and tears”) than FDR’s (“a day that will live in infamy”, “all we have to fear is fear itself”, and I hit a wall).

So never select a gargantuan word when a minuscule one will suffice.

Of course, the most fluent name for something is one’s own name. Believe it or not, people who have the same initial as a hurricane give more in disaster relief to that hurricane. The theory is that people want to distance themselves from the act that “they” are committing.

This works in other ways as well. I once tested state-specific victim stories in direct mail pieces. In half of them, I indicated that the story came from that person’s state; in half, I didn’t. Response rates went up an average of 30% when the story presented in a place the person was familiar with. Thus, customization to personalize the details of stories to your audience can raise more money.

Details also have a powerful nominative effect. In the classic Made to Stick, which I strongly recommend, the Heath brothers relay the study that stuck in my mind as the Darth Vader toothbrush study. Simulated juries were given eight facts for and eight facts against.

darth vader toothbrushThe stories differed only in detail. Half received irrelevant details for the good side: e.g., instead of just “Mrs. Johnson sees to it that her child washes and brushes his teeth before bedtime,” they added “He uses a Star Wars toothbrush that looks like Darth Vader.”

The other half received irrelevant details for the dark side: e.g., in addition to “The child went to school with a badly scraped arm which Mrs. Johnson had not cleaned or attended to. The school nurse had to clean the scrape,” they mentioned that the school nurse spilled the treatment, staining her uniform red.

Jurors who heard vivid details for the good things judged Mrs. Johnson to be a more suitable parent than jurors who heard the unfavorable arguments with vivid details. So make sure you are providing a real picture for your audience.

There is also a framing effect to word choice. Everyone in the abortion debate wants to be pro-life or pro-choice and not anti-life or anti-choice.

I find this to be especially true for verbs. Ideally, you will be able to ditch adverbs like ideally and have your verbs do the heavy lifting. In a study, witnesses were asked how fast two cars were going when they crashed. Except instead of crashed, the authors tended a few different verbs; here are the results:

  • Smashed: 40.5 MPH
  • Collided: 39.3 MPH
  • Bumped: 38.1 MPH
  • Hit: 34.0 MPH
  • Contacted: 31.8 MPH

Let me stress this: they watched the same crash. All that was different was the word that the question used and you still see an impact of almost 30%.

So how can you improve your own copy? One solution is Hemingway, an app that allows you to upload your copy. It then highlights long sentences, adverbs, passive constructions, etc. The reading ease score that comes with Word or similar software can also help.

Or ask a child to read it and see what s/he thinks.

Hope this helps your writing! If you would like some more of my favorite writings of the week, please sign up for my weekly newsletter, which has the feature “favorite thing I didn’t write this week.” I’m very creative at naming things.

What’s in a name? Word choice in direct marketing