psychology

This is your brain on direct mail

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Readers of a certain age (namely, around my own) will recognize the 80’s era PSA that taught a generation of Americans about proper egg cookery.

But the truth is that your brain is awash in drugs constantly.  They just happen to be of your body’s own making.

So this week, I want to take a look at how people’s brains receive our direct marketing communications and how it should influence our efforts.

Three caveats:

  1. I am not a brain scientist.
  2. Neuromarketing is still in its infancy.  It’s difficult to tell whether what is lighting up on an fMRI is a cause or an effect.  To a large extent, we are still black boxes, where we can observe what’s going in and coming out, but only guess at what happens in the middle.  There’s also a great deal of hucksterism in the community because of the newness.
  3. If #2 were wrong, I wouldn’t necessarily know it because of #1.

Now, if you are still with me, I’d like to talk about how the brain processes tangible marketing (e.g., mail) versus non-tangible marketing (e.g., online).

Temple University (at the request of the Postal Service Inspector General, so not the purest possible study) looked at how the brain processes mail versus online. 

They showed subjects a mix of 40 postcards and emails and monitored them through eye tracking (for visual attention), fingertip sensors for heart rate, breathing, sweating (for emotional engagement), and MRIs (for brain activity).  

Online efforts were distinctly better in one thing: focusing attention.  On the other hand, print won in terms of emotional interaction/arousal, engagement time, desirability for the things in the ads and recall.  The two means tied for memory recall and information processing.

Specifically, the researchers found greater activity in the hippocampus and areas around the hippocampus for physical ads than in digital ads.  The hippocampus is associated with memory formation and retrieval, meaning that participants could remember a greater context for their paper-based stimuli.

If you are a fan of Sherlock, as I am, or the book Hannibal (eh…) you know about the memory technique known as a mind palace — associating things you want to remember with physical locations.  Part of the reason this works is that tangible things are, well, more tangible and easier to retrieve out of memory.

As a result, a week later, subjects showed greater emotional memory for print.

This was replicated in a UK study and a Canadian study. Specifically, with print, more processing took place in the right retrosplenial cortex, which I had never heard of before this paper.  Apparently, this is involved in processing emotional cues and helping them get into memory.

So, in our first foray into brain science, we can say that while people may focus more on online images (in part because it is a more structured environment; life is rarely so structured outside of a computer screen), they forge greater bonds with mail.

The one caveat to this is that mail versus print ads misses the interactivity that is possible online.  It didn’t test video, or click-throughs, or quizzes: just static online ads.  So, just as we shouldn’t trumpet the death of direct mail, neither should we dismiss online as mere ephemera.  There’s more to learn here.

And we’ll do some of that tomorrow with the role of dopamine in nonprofit direct marketing.

This is your brain on direct mail

An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

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When was the last time you saw an analog, mercury-based thermometer?  Chances are, it was in a fundraising campaign, indicating how close you were to goal.  Even as thermometers go digital, their ancestors are honored through skeuomorphism* to symbolize progress.

But we come here not to bury the fundraising thermometer, but to praise it.

Specifically, we want to praise how the fundraising thermometer, or a specific state of it, can make people more likely to donate.

fundraising-thermometer-template

Cryder, Loewenstein, and Seltman took a look at how the amount toward goal already raised impacts a person’s likelihood of giving here.

They call it the goal gradient hypothesis: they think that people will be more likely to donate the closer a campaign is to goal.

So they tested this with Kiva, the microlending site that you may remember from such hits as “does being more attractive increase your chances of getting funded on Kiva”?  (Yes, it does.)

They found that when an individual fundraising goal was 0-33% complete, the average hourly progress toward goal was 6.7%.  When it was 33-66% complete, progress was 10.8% per hour; for the final third, it was 12.8% per hour.

So, having the thermometer partial full helped increase fundraising efforts.  This would tend to make sense, since the thermometer is a measure of social proof, a potent persuader.  (It’s the same reason that servers will seed a tip jar with larger denomination bills — it helps set the pressure and the anchor)

Hey, I can hear you yawning.  Yes, I know you aren’t going to be going on Kiva tomorrow.  But we’re just warming up.  The researchers then worked with a nonprofit to mail lapsed donors.  They had three separate goals that they were trying to reach and mentioned that one was 10% complete, a second was 66% complete, and the third was 80% complete.  They also had control conditions where no progress was mentioned.

Sure enough, the 10% and 66% conditions were not significantly different from the no progress control.  However, the 85%-to-goal piece significantly increased response rate (from .5% in the control to 1.17% in the 85%-to-goal version).

They even tested the “why” of this with donor surveys.  They asked people if they would be more likely to buy candy bars from a 7th grade fundraiser if the fundraiser was two bars short of goal or 32 bars short.  Two-bars-left won handily.  Additionally, the donors who chose the two bars indicated they felt like they were having a bigger impact and were more satisfied with their donation.

So, since not everyone can be the donation that pushes you over the finish line, how can you use this?

One tactic is to have a silent period of a campaign.  For online year-end giving, I’ve worked with organizations that will set their goal and their thermometer based on what it will take to hit goal starting from November 1, but only announce the goal and the effort on Giving Tuesday.  That way, their thermometer is at least 20% full when the first donor hits the form.

Another is to ask internal audiences (especially board members) to make the first gifts.  Showing them this research may help them feel like their gift is making a difference by getting others to give more freely.

Finally, you can define down your goal.  The 85%-to-goal condition mentioned above was based on being 85% toward buying a GPS unit for an international relief organization.  This is not a high-ticket item.  By setting the goal low, they were able to talk about 85% complete easily.  This type of microcampaign, repeated writ large, can help illustrate impact for your donors.

So keep those thermometers more than half full and you should be on your way to filling it up the rest of the way.
* A design based on an older version of an item to help people understand the newfangled version.  It’s the reason that email programs look like folded envelopes and your video app probably features an old-school movie clapper.

Thanks to Tim Vandevall here for the thermometer image.

If you’d like more nonprofit direct marketing content like this, please subscribe to my free weekly newsletter. You’ll get all of my blog posts, plus special subscribers-only content.

An ode to the mostly filled thermometer

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.

 

mission2bimpossible2bfuse2blighting2bmatch2btv

(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.

usdollar100front

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

“Our donors” and channel conflict

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According to psychological studies, human territoriality is a multifaceted concept that includes physical space, possession, defense, exclusiveness of use, markers, and personalization.   

giphyI think of Milton from Office Space.  He possesses his personalized red stapler in his tiny cubicle fortress than he does not want to leave and eventually fights to defend. 

How often are we like this with our donors?

Even the phrase “our donors” is illusory.  A donor no more belongs to your organization than I belong to Google just because I am dependent on their search engine and mail programs for even the most basic forms of knowledge seeking and human interactions, respectively.

OK, bad example.  But you get the idea.

A donor doesn’t really belong to your organization; they are free to leave at any time (and frequently do).  

And they certainly don’t belong to any one aspect of your organization.

Yet we aim to possess donors, erect walls for their defense from other types of fundraisers, even mark our territory on them.

The thing that got me thinking about this is Joshua Benton’s excellent piece with NiemanLab about NPR’s decision not to promote the NPR One app or its podcasts on its terrestrial radio stations. 

They will not ask for any downloads or mention podcast hosts in a way that would be seen as an endorsement.

Part of this is understandable.  Radio stations pay the bulk of NPR’s bills.  These stations want to hold on to their share of ear and make sure that people listen to radio stations.  They exert pressure; NPR folds.

But this feels very much like the classic Theodore Levitt article about Marketing Myopia:

 

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented…

 

OK, a virtual show of hands.  Who thinks that NPR’s long-term future is in traditional radio-wave-based radio?  OK…  OK… thanks.  Hands down.  

Now who thinks their long-term future is in online radio, podcast, and things we haven’t even thought of yet?  OK… OK… keep them up… there are a lot of you to count…

Yep.  Exactly.  Yet because of territoriality, they mortgage the future for the present.

So what business is NPR in?  Are they in the radio business?  Or are they in the informational (or entertainment or thought-provoking) business?

The same is true for your nonprofit.  You put up barriers to protect your walk donors from being over-solicited or make sure your major donor prospect don’t get mail pieces that might soil their hands.  You make sure that national/local doesn’t get their stinkin’ mitts on “your donors” because that money should stay local/national.  As if it matters which pocket gets filled.

In what business are you in your direct marketing?  If you are not in the loving-donors-and-being-loved-by-donors business, might you be in the wrong business?  If a $20 mail donor becomes a $500 walk team captain, and that fills that donor up with warmth, do you view that as a $20 loss?  Then you are in the wrong business.

So this week, we’ll try to explode some myths about “our donors.”  They are not only your nonprofit’s donors.  They are not permanently destined to stay in a single channel.  They are not national’s or local’s.  They can be communicated with both personally and through direct marketing.  And so on.

And we’ll discuss some solutions, including a potentially radical (ironic) solution on Friday.  You won’t want to miss it.

Or, if you do want to miss it, hopefully we’ll catch you next week!

“Our donors” and channel conflict

An quick update on the science of slacktivism

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Back in January, I posted about three studies on slacktivism.  And back in March, we looked at whether people who think of themselves as good do good things.  Generally, these studies found:

  • People tend to keep their commitments and do the good things they say they are going to.
  • They do this unless they did a public pledge first.  The public pledge seemed to allow them to manage their reputation as they wished, with not as much need to follow through.
  • Social media fundraising campaigns don’t really do much unless involving buckets, ice, and/or challenges.

There’s a new study out in the March edition of Sociological Science (yes, I know, March isn’t entirely new; my copy must have been held up in the mail by the fact that I am not a subscriber) that bolsters these claims.

They went through a sample of 3500 pledges for donations made through an online social media/donation facilitation platform.  Of those pledges, 64 percent were fulfilled, 13 percent were partially fulfilled, and 16 percent were deleted. However, people who broadcast their pledges on social were more likely to delete and not fulfill their pledge donations.  This fits the thesis of people who pledge do so largely to look good and are less likely to follow through.

They also found from using Facebook ads and other social media techniques, and I’m going to just let them tell this part from their abstract:

The experiment also shows that, although the campaigns reached approximately 6.4 million users and generated considerable attention in the form of clicks and “likes,” only 30 donations were made.

Please print out this quote and point to it every time someone says mail is dead because of low response rates.

So, to replay the recommendations from advocacy campaigns:

  • Do them.  A properly run advocacy campaign can increase the likelihood that someone will donate and take other actions for your organization.
  • Make them private.  Public petitions appear to satisfy a person’s desire to manage their reputation, so they were less willing to take other actions.
  • By extension, don’t do them on social networks.  Not only are they not public, but you do not have the easy wherewithal to communicate with them to get the first gift or convert to other activities.
  • Make the ask.  It can be as easy as having an ask for the donation on the confirmation page or receipt for a petition.  Folks who take private actions want to help and are in a mindset of helping.  I personally have seen advocacy campaigns with a soft ask after taking the petition raise more money than a hard ask to a full list.  Crazy, but true.

Thanks.  This is my first shorter weekend content.  Let me know if you liked or didn’t like at nick@directtodonor.com.  I saw the story and wanted to get the word out, but want to know from you, the reader, if this is valuable.

An quick update on the science of slacktivism

Learning from political fundraising: chip in change for change

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You’ve seen the headlines: “Americans more divided than ever”, “Gridlock reaching threat level crimson, which is worse than red somehow”, and “Pelosi-McConnell dancing knife fight leaves two dead.”*

Seemingly, parties can’t agree on anything.

But here’s a ray of hope.  They can agree on donors chipping in:

Martin O’Malley:

chipinomalley

Rand Paul:

chipinrandpaul

Bobby Jindal:

chipinjindal

DCCC:

chipindccc

RNC:

chipinnrcc

Jeb Bush:

chipinbush

Bernie Sanders and MoveOn:

chipinsanders

John Kasich:

chipinkasich

Marco Rubio:

chipinrubio

Hillary Clinton:

chipinclinton

I’ll be honest: usually my research for this blog is harder than this.  The hardest parts of finding these were:

  1. Remembering who had been running for president.  For example, it turns out Lincoln Chafee is not a model of car.
  2. Finding photographic from former campaign sites.  There’s evidence that Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and others used chip-in language, but couldn’t find them online.  So passes away the glory of a presidential campaign.

But nonprofits don’t seem to be using “chip in” much.  Yet.  I think BirdConservancy.org was the largest organization I could find in my Googling.

So why do political organizations almost unanimously use “chip in”?  Here are my theories:

  • “Chip in” sounds very small. Giving permission for small donations increases the likelihood of giving. This is probably part of the appeal.  This extends to the standard ask strings.  Clinton, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Sanders, and the current Republican frontrunner (since I pledged I wouldn’t use his name as a cheap SEO play) all start their asks at $3-25.  In fact, if you take out Kasich, the highest initial ask is $15 (ironically, for Bernie Sanders).
  • Making a cost sound small also decreases the amount of pain that someone feels from making a purchase/donation. 
  • The value of a name in political spheres far exceeds just their donation value.  A $3 donor is also a voter at worst and perhaps a volunteer or district captain.  And of course, they may be able to give more in the future.  A $2,700 donor is these things, plus someone who may be able to attract like-minded funders at a max level.

    I say this is in political spheres.  But isn’t this true for your nonprofit as well?  You want that $3 donor as a volunteer, walker, bequest donor, monthly donor, etc.  And yet we generally have higher online ask thresholds. 
  • “Chip in” implies that others are doing the same.  In fact, Oxford Dictionaries defines “chip in” as “contribute something as one’s share of a joint activity, cost, etc.”  Social proof is a powerful persuasive force and knowing that others are doing it and are counting on you too can greatly influence decisions. 
  • People like to be a part of something bigger than themselves.  This is especially true for causes, political or non-profit.  The ability to make something part of your identity that ties you into a larger in-group can be very powerful.

So I’d encourage you to try chipping in as part of your emailing strategy (and, if it works, test elsewhere) as a way of pulling these cognitive levers.

A post-script: after I drafted this piece, this came in from the Clinton campaign:

unnamed

 

* I will offer a free signed book (in that I will print out any one of my ebooks , sign it, and mail it to you) for the first person who can do a Photoshop of this based on West Side Story.

 

Learning from political fundraising: chip in change for change

Learning from political fundraising: the eyes have it

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This week, we’ll look at some of the lessons we in the nonprofit world can learn from those in the political world.

Wait!  Don’t leave!

I know I said that I would be counterprogramming to the blogs that turn out 7 Vital Marketing Lessons from This Year’s Oscar Winners topical content.  But:

  1. There are actually lessons that we can take from the political realm.  If you haven’t read The Victory Lab or Rick Perry and His Eggheads, I strongly recommend them as valuable insights into another industry that relies on donations for its livelihood.
  2. Political fundraising has to be crazy fast and efficient.  Imagine if in November, your nonprofit was going to either win or lose: accomplish all of your goals or cease to exist.  When the stakes are that high, there are distilled lessons that we can benefit from.
  3. It’s only going to get worse and I can’t stomach putting this topic off until December.

So how about this: I will not mention the current (as of this writing) Republican frontrunner despite the potential clickbait. Instead, I’ll try for a nonpartisan look at some items that may be helpful for we nonprofits.

The first one is relatively brief.  In looking at campaign Web sites, take a look at what the candidates’ eyes are doing.  Here’s Hillary Clinton’s Web site — an older version:

hillary-clinton-2016-campaign-website-600

 

And here’s Bernie Sanders.

berniesmall

What do you notice in common?

The eyes of the candidate are looking at what they want you look at.  This isn’t true in all or even most candidates’ cases: many of them are looking right at the camera or staring off into the future.

But those are missed opportunities.  Studies show that humans automatically look a few discrete places: where arrows or people point* and where other people’s eyes are looking (one such study is here )

Kissmetrics shows a great heat map of where people look when a photo is looking at the camera. 

7-baby-face

Because the baby is looking at the user, users get locked up in the baby’s eyes with no indication of where they should next look.

Now, take a look where people look when the baby is looking at the text:

8-baby-face-eye-tracking

Here’s another good example from QuickSprout.  Looking at the camera:

sunsilk-uncued

And looking toward the product:

sunsilk-cued
So, when Hillary or Bernie are looking at where you put in your email address, guess what the next action is they want you do to.

Now, take a look at your home page.  Where are your pictures looking?  And where do you want people to look?

 

* Where arrows point: what, you thought this from Clinton’s site is a coincidence?

arrows

Learning from political fundraising: the eyes have it