emotional appeals

Who is the hero of your story arc?

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Going back to Aristotle, drama has been described in rising action, climax, and falling action (or, in his words, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe).  Even now, when a movie is good, even great, for a while (*cough*cough*Spectre*cough*cough), but doesn’t have a satisfying ending, we call it a third act problem.

The German playwright Gustav Freytag formalized this in Freytag’s pyramid for a five-act structure:

2000px-freytags_pyramid-svg

I was skeptical of how much this could have an impact today.  After all, as we said with the donor pyramid, all pyramids are lies.

But research backs this up.  Keith Quesenbery, a researcher at Johns Hopkins, looked at 108 Super Bowl commercials and found that people were drawn to the ones that had a five-act narrative arc like a Shakespearian play.  In fact, from this, he was able to predict the most effective 2014 Super Bowl ad in ratings and, apparently, in sales.

What does this tell us about how we should structure our nonprofit stories?  With this type of narrative, clearly.  Good stories like this release oxytocin in our donors’ brains and oxytocin is related to increased giving.

But how?  

If the pyramid doesn’t speak to you, perhaps Wall-E or Woody or Lightning McQueen will.  Former Pixar storyteller Emma Coats tweeted out (speaking of, her feed is a wealth of storytelling ideas) story rules for Pixar films.  #4 was:

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

 

Think of how this fits a tradition nonprofit story:

Once upon a time there was Janice.  Every day, Janice would pick up her kids from school.  She’d ask them how their days were.  Joan said “fine” every day and little Jake would talk a mile a minute until they got home.

But then one day, Janice found a lump in the shower.  She forgot to ask her kids how their day was, so preoccupied was she with this discovery.  So she went to her doctor, who gave her the news.  She’d caught it early.

She decided to fight.  Her whole family decided to fight.  And fight she did.

It’s five years later now.  She still picks her kids up from school.  But today, she’s going to celebrate — five years cancer-free.  She’ll be walking to end all cancer.  Will you?

This is not a bad story.  Granted, it lacks a certain what you might call… quality — details and action verbs and things that will create a fleshed out narrative.  You can picture it being an appeal letter or email.  And it’s a strong narrative.

So I encourage this type of five-act structure as you build out your campaigns.

But that’s not the end of this story.  Here’s the M. Night Shyamalan twist ending. (Hopefully early Shyamalan.)

Who is the hero of this story?

The person you are talking to — the potential donor — enters the story in the last two words of that appeal.  Two words.

What if you took that same narrative structure and made the donor the hero, or at least a parallel hero?

Three years ago, every day, you would go to the mailbox and see a phone bill or a Sharper Image catalog you would never order anything from.

One day, you got a letter. It asked you to save a life.  And you, being a kind and generous person made a gift, to see what type of an impact you could have.

Because of that, because of you, Janice knew how to perform a self-examination.  Because of that, because of you, Janice was able to get the care she needed.  And now, she’s cancer-free.

And it’s not just Janice.  Because of your support over the past seven years, there’s been research that will help other survivors survive.

Together, I know we’ll keep saving lives and helping people.  Until that great day when your support takes down all cancer, now and forever.

Which do you think will raise more?  I’d say they’d be about even as they stand; we need to get some of that emotion from the first piece into this one.  But it’s a philosophical shift we can make to engage better.

Who is the hero of your story arc?

Oxytocin and direct marketing: beyond the cuddle chemical

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Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the hypothalamus, which is responsible for a number of major autonomic (or unconscious, like breathing) functions of the body.

Oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle chemical or the hug hormone.  It’s a natural classification.  Oxytocin is released naturally as a part of childbirth and is associated with maternal behavior and social attachment.  

However, it goes much beyond this.  More recent research has shown it’s important in the formation of trust.  People dosed with oxytocin are more willing to trust their money with strangers.  Some researchers think this is because they are also more able to read facial expressions and emotional states.

On the dark side of oxytocin, while it promotes trust with in-group members, it also increases distrust of foreigners and outgroup members (study here). 

More to the point of nonprofit direct marketing, when people empathize with a story, oxytocin levels are on average 47% higher. (study here)  (More so among women than men, which is perhaps why women are more likely to empathize and give charitably).

This translates to additional giving.  Subjects who received oxytocin gave to 57% more causes and 56% more money after exposure to PSAs (study).

But that’s nothing compared with what is possible.  In the same study, they looked at what happened when people experienced increases in both oxytocin and a fast-acting arousal hormone called adrenocorticotropic hormone (which people abbreviate ACTH for obvious reasons).  When the PSA increased both of these, giving increases 261%.

This means that the story has to both arouse empathy (releasing oxytocin) and draw the person in (stimulating ACTH).

So how do you do that with your narrative?

First thing is to take what your high school English teacher taught you about the five-act structure of plays, where you have rising action, leading to a climax, then a falling action that leads to a resolution.  Remember that?  (You may even remember the term Freytag’s pyramid, in which case, good job, Hermione.)

Now crumple it into a ball, throw it away, and try to forget it ever existed.  As we’ve said before, all pyramids are lies.  Even in the two-minute video that Zak used to test his subjects, attention tended to drift until tension raised again.  This is far less Freytag’s pyramid and far more the latest Avengers movie, where there has to be a tension set piece every so often to hold interest.

The goals are emotional resonance and attention holding.  When you have a narrative that does that, you release oxytocin and ACTH.  And when you do that, you get donations.

We’ve talked a lot about ways to do this, imagery and specific details being particular favorites.  However, when it boils down to it, take a look at your story.  If there are any paragraphs, sentences or words (especially adverbs!) that don’t help one identify with the people in the story or hold the attention of the reader/listener/watcher, cut it.

It’s brutal, but you need to hold attention and create empathy with it in order to succeed.

Tomorrow, we’ll get out of chemistry and into how people make decisions.  

Oxytocin and direct marketing: beyond the cuddle chemical

Step one in welcoming: the thank you

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I’ve already done a week on thanking your donors.  Somehow, I managed to talk about why to thank people, rules for thanking donors, 50 ways to thank donors, and ways to thank people multichannel-ly.

And I didn’t talk about what should be in a thank you.

It’s a wonder you even read this blog — thank you for that.

One source to which I’m indebted for this week and many others is Roger Craver’s Retention Fundraising. It is a classic about how to retain donors that I can’t recommend highly enough.  He posits that there are seven drivers of retention:

  • Are you effective at your mission?
  • Does the donor know what to expect from interactions with you?
  • Are your thank yous timely?
  • Do you listen?
  • Does the donor feel s/he is a part of something important?
  • Does the donor feel appreciated?
  • Does the donor receive information about who is being helped?

These are the things you are trying to accomplish with your thank you, and with your welcome series.  Most of these apply to any acknowledgment, but they are most important for a first gift.

Remember emotion.  So many acknowledgments aren’t thank you notes.  They sound like they were written by someone trying to tell Sgt. Friday about your donation.

jack_webb_joe_friday_dragnet_1957

At 1430 hours, the suspect made a donation.
It was tax deductible pursuant to 26 US Code 170.

They are long on amount and date and making sure your name right and short on capturing anything related to the donor’s experience in making the gift.  As we’ve discussed, the vast majority of gifts are made not because of what someone thought, but what they felt.  The thank you know should respond to this in kind.

Specify to why.  Along the same lines, the thank you should not just replicate the emotion of the original, but also tie into the story and the reason for giving.  If someone gave with a petition attached, the thank you should reference the petition and how it is helping make a difference.  If they gave you their email address on the reply device, they should be thanked in both medium.  Ideally, the signatory of the thank you should be the same signer of the appeal letter.

Especially with a first gift, it’s important to establish trust.  Relating the thank you to the gift is a good way of establishing that trust.

Remember their past giving.  If they’ve been giving for 10 years, let them know you know that.  While not strictly related to welcome packages, it’s important not to forget this.

Prove the impact.  This also helps build trust.  If you said the donor’s gift would help build a well, the story and pictures, and emotional impact from the thank you should be related to the impact from the well.  Especially if you are not a name-brand charity, the donor is taking a chance on you doing what you say you are going to do with the donation.  Letting them know that you did helps build a relationship and ties them to the impact (not the output) they were hoping to have.

Remember, the donor wants to know who they helped and why that’s important.  Help them.

Differentiate.  A first donation is more predictive than any other donation.  If someone donates an abnormally high amount to your first solicitation of them, they are uniquely dedicated to your cause and/or of substantially greater means than the average donor.  Chances are good that you have a special procedure for anyone who gives over a certain amount (let’s say $1000) to your organization, whether it’s a phone call or handwritten note.  I would advocate you extend this to people whose first gift is abnormally high.  It may seem odd to extend the same treatment to someone who gives $1000 and someone who gives $100, but chances are good that that $100 donor is your $1000 donor of the future.

Do not delay for differentiation.  That said, you hear horror stories of processes for larger donors that delay their thank yous.  You may think I’m exaggerating here, but at the summer camp for future non-profit direct marketers, the counselors would shine a flashlight on their face from under their chin and say things like “And then the letters sat on the executive director’s desk.  And they sat.  And they sat.  And they sat.  For over. Three.  Weeks.”  We campers would not be able to go to sleep, knowing that our best donors were getting the worst treatment.

Perhaps I went to the wrong type of summer camp.

Anyway, there are four solutions to this dilemma:

  1. Light a fire under whoever is supposed to be writing or calling
  2. Pick someone else to do the writing or calling (or have a team of people to share the load)
  3. Use a quasi-high-touch solution like outbound voice mail or pseudo-handwritten cards
  4. Send a regular thank-you note immediately, then follow-up with a phone call or handwritten note

All of these have their merits, but I strongly recommend solution four.  Not only will this thank the donor twice, which is rarely a bad thing, but it will make your process independent of personalities.  I am a big fan of processes that work regardless of the people who are in them.  You may say your ED or board member is extremely punctual with their calls and letters, but this may not always be the case.

Test high-touch pieces below where you currently are doing them.  If you aren’t differentiating at all, well, now’s a great time to start.  If you are, I recommend a test of doing handwritten notes, phone calls, or other high-touch solutions to at least a segment of whatever half of your current threshold value is (so, if you do $1000+, try it with $500+ donors).  Track their giving over the next year and see if it pans out.

My guess is that, if your organization is like almost every other organization I’ve seen, three things are true:

  • Your current threshold was set by someone in the mists of time because it was a good round number that didn’t sound like an overwhelming amount of work for the person/people involved.
  • It has gone through little to no scientific inquiry in the interim.
  • There are touchpoints you can do that will raise the value of the next tier of donors that will justify the amount of work necessary.

There is a who-is-going-to-tie-the-bell-around-the-cat’s-neck problem with this solution.  I would recommend you, the reader of this blog.  Talking to contributors and thanking them for making important work possible is beneath no one.  You will likely not only get a lift in your response rates, but you will also gain vital donor intelligence that few others in your organization will get by having actual conversations with actual donors.

Turn off regular communications with new donors for a certain amount of time.  In the mail, this is easy.  Chances are you have already pulled the list of people you are going to be mailing 30-60 days from now.  Thus, a suppression emerges naturally (although you may wish to lengthen it).  For online initiates, there is a temptation to drop them into regular communications immediately.  

Don’t.

Remember yesterday’s post — you are looking to thank this person, learn about them, have them learn about (and perhaps interact in a non-donor context with) you, and make a strategic ask for a second gift.

If they are dropped into regular communications, there is a near-100% certainty that they will get asked with no learning, which is not strategic.

The amount of time is not really the important part; accomplishing your communications goals is, so you can test what the right amount of time is for you.  And, as Roger told you at the top, be sure to let them know what they can expect from you (and I would add “and allow them to change that default”).

What do you put in the interim?  Well, that’s what I’ll talk about for the rest of the week.

If you would like to get these weeks in digest form, please sign up for my weekly newsletter, where you’ll get not only context for these posts, but also my random neural firings and previews of upcoming posts.  You won’t want to miss it.

Unless you do and that’s fine too — I just appreciate that you are reading.

Step one in welcoming: the thank you

Education versus emotion in direct marketing appeals

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You can not educate your donors into giving.  It’s close to a cardinal rule in direct response fundraising.

At the same time, it’s a constant temptation.  You have great programs that save and change lives.  You’ve worked hard to validate that you are making a significant impact.  And you’d love to tell someone about it who cares.

Karlan and Wood tested education versus emotion in mail appeals.  And while the results are a bit more obvious than the last two days’ studies, they are still instructive for direct marketers.

The researchers sent mailers to recent donors (which they define as past three years, an interesting difference between researchers and we direct marketing practitioners, who would likely look at people who made a single gift almost three years ago as lapsed rather than recent).  In the first test, the control group (⅔) received an emotional and personal story about a participant in the nonprofit’s program.  In the test group (⅓), there was an additional paragraph in the insert, which talked about the “rigorous scientific methodologies” that demonstrated the impact of the nonprofit’s program.

For the follow-up, one-third received an emotional appeal, one-third received the control letter plus paragraphs about program effectiveness, and one-third received the control letter plus paragraphs about program effectiveness that explicitly cited Yale researchers as the source of program effectiveness.  This is likely an attempt to use authority influence similar to the Gates Foundation study discussed last week.

The researchers found that the information on program effectiveness had no impact on either likelihood of giving or amount given.

That is a nail in the coffin for those who think we should be talking about program effectiveness and double-blind studies and outputs versus outcomes versus impacts in our fundraising copy.

And we could bury that coffin now except for an interesting split that the researchers found in the data: effectiveness data turned off smaller donors and turned on larger donors.

That is to say, people who had given larger amounts (about $100+ more recently) were about one percentage point more likely to donate when given effectiveness information and donated $4.45 more.  Smaller donors were .6 percentage points less likely to donate when given effectiveness information.  With controls in place for things like household income, previous gifts, etc., the researchers were able to reject the idea that larger and smaller donors behave the same.

This goes to the idea that there are two different mechanisms for giving going on: heart gifts and head gifts.  (Or, if you prefer the Kahnemann nomenclature, gifts that come from System I and System II).

Your smaller donors are potentially giving gifts because of how it makes them feel and how you make them feel as a result.  A $10 gift is something many can do without deep contemplation.  However, if you are dedicating a more substantial part of your income to a gift, you may want to know that Yale researchers (or, better yet, Vanderbilt researchers) have backed up the program’s effectiveness.

The lesson that comes from this, in my mind, is that we should not have the same verbiage in our letters for a high dollar and a low dollar audience.  In fact, this study indicates that you can get more and larger gifts from your high-dollar donors with a simple paragraph addition to your existing emotional impact appeal.

In the unlikely event that there are social scientist researchers reading this, this study presents three questions in my mind:

  1. Does the amount at which the heart/head switch occurs depend on your income?  That is, for some, $100 is a life-changing amount of money; for others, it’s a tip at a restaurant.  My thought would be that everyone has a different threshold for what type of gift is which.
  2. Is this why we see an end to people upgrading their gifts at a certain point?  That is, once a charity has recruited your heart, is there a point beyond which you won’t give to them because they are entering the head realm?
  3. Finally, is this part of the reason sustaining gifts work well is that they break down a gift that, annualized, would require sign-off from the brain into gifts that can be given on an emotional basis?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Education versus emotion in direct marketing appeals