slacktivism

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

The science of slacktivism

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Online advocacy has a bad name.  Specifically: slacktivism (or clicktivism).  Seth Meyers put the prevailing opinion into funny words on SNL:

o-snl-weekend-update-facebook

“Look, if you make a Facebook page we will “like” it—it’s the least we can do.
But it’s also the most we can do.”

This frames the debate well.  Some think that online activism is a prelude to future action — a way people signal they are interested in your cause and are working to do more.  Others think it is a way for people (and here they will often say Millennials — check out my posts from a couple weeks ago as to why this is bull) to feel good about themselves while doing very little.

So what does science say?

I’ll give you the TL;DR version now: campaigns that are good help future action; campaigns that suck don’t.

OK, perhaps that wasn’t all that satisfying.  But you wanted to read about the science anyway, right?

There are three interesting studies on this that I wanted to highlight.  The first is from Lee and Hsieh here.  They found that people who signed a petition were more likely to donate to a related nonprofit afterward.  This makes sense given what we know about the importance of consistency in persuasion.  

The more interesting part of the study is that they also found that people who didn’t take the advocacy action were more likely donate to another unrelated nonprofit thereafter.  They call this moral balancing.  The idea is that people feel a bit guilty that they didn’t take a pro-social action, so they want to balance this with an unrelated prosocial action.  I’m not sure yet what practical effect this has (unless I can rent a list of another nonprofit’s non-petition signers), but it’s interesting and it shows that people perceive an online petition as a positive thing that they generally should be doing.

The second study I would recommend is from Kristofferson, White, and Peloza. They come right to the question of whether a token action leads to greater action in the future with five different studies.  My favorite, and the easiest to explain, is one where had three groups: one who were given a poppy to wear in honor of veterans, one who were given that same poppy in an envelope so it would be for private support, and one who were given nothing.  At the end of the hallway, the groups were asked to donate.  Those who showed private support (poppy in the envelope) gave an average of $.86, public supporters gave $.34, and the control gave $.15.  They further refined this study in other ways and found that generally, people who gave private support were more likely to support in the future; people who gave public support were either no more likely or less likely to support the cause than those who did nothing.

The third study, from Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich, found similarly — that Facebook activism (perhaps because it is public) doesn’t often translate to any further activity.  Looking at a Save Darfur campaign, 99.7% of people did not make a donation and 72.2% didn’t recruit anyone else.  Of those who donated, 95% did only once and of those who recruited, 45% recruited only one other person.  Hardly a sustainable effort.  The authors hypothesize that this is because Facebook is full of both strong and weak social ties, so you want to advertise your best self to this group.

However, there was a committed group of people on Facebook: it was just very small.  The top one percent of advocates made the 80-20 rule turn away in shame, responsible as they were for 63% of membership recruitment and 47% of donations.  The study also found that recruits were more likely to donate and donors more like to recruit.  So once you got someone over a very high threshold, some people would work wonders, but these were unicorns in a world of horses.

So here are the implications that I see for 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.

Hopefully, this has given you the data to incorporate advocacy into your campaigns the right way.  For the rest of the week, I’ll be talking about how to incorporate in the mail, acquiring online advocates, and converting advocates to donors.

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The science of slacktivism

Advocacy and nonprofit direct marketing

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The most common question about nonprofit advocacy efforts is “can we actually do that with our nonprofit status?”

Absolutely.  I’m not an attorney and this is not a legal opinion, but I can point you to the IRS Web site:

In general, no organization may qualify for section 501(c)(3) status if a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation (commonly known as lobbying).  A 501(c)(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status.

So what does “substantial part” mean?  There are two ways you can quantify this.  The first is a Potter Stewart-esque “the IRS knows it when it sees it” type test.  The second, and more logical, one is as a percentage of revenues.  The full chart is here.

The thing to note is that it applies to expenditures.  If you set up an online petition about a specific bill and allow constituents to email their representatives, there are no marginal costs — only the costs of the platform that allows for this type to advocacy and your time working on the alert.  This is part of why online advocacy is so popular among nonprofits.

Mail is a little bit more challenging because of the expense involved but attorneys of my acquaintance have said (and remember, I’m not a lawyer), not all advocacy is lobbying.  Mentioning a specific bill number or a highly publicized issue that has a bill on it qualifies, but sending in a petition asking for higher priority for breast cancer research or environmental preservation probably does not qualify.

So now that you know you can do it, should you?  I would answer absolutely.  As nonprofits, we are working to solve social ills.  There is almost always something a governmental entity can do, or stop doing, that will help with some of the underlying parts of the ill you are looking to solve.

Additionally, as you might guessed since I am bringing up advocacy in a direct marketing context, advocacy is often an outstanding way to acquire, retain, and cultivate donors.  Advocacy appeals frequently have outstanding urgency to them (which I’ve noted helps with persuasion) and give you people with a deeper connection to your mission.  Additionally, as we discussed last week, having knowledge of your donors and which like advocacy appeals can be vital for customizing your communications to them.

But they have to be done the right way.  Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the debate on the value of online slacktivism and how to craft your online communications to make sure your advocacy doesn’t end with the Like.  And for the rest of the week, I’ll cover petitions in the mail, acquiring advocates, and converting advocates into donors.

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Advocacy and nonprofit direct marketing

Influence in direct marketing: commitment and consistency

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Just like people tend to do what other people do, people also tend to do what they themselves have done in the past.

Emerson said famously that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Of course, that’s probably what he always said.

Our mind is wired to think we were right more often than we actually were.  Moreover, we have cognitive dissonance as a tool to help us justify these feelings.  So if we are right all the time, then why wouldn’t we keep doing what we are doing?

This is especially true for older supporters.  A study called “Evidence of a Positive Relationship between Age and Preference for Consistency” (with Cialdini as a co-author – he shows up a lot of different places) found that as we get older, we tend to want to have consistent thoughts, people in our lives, and patterns.  Since a large portion of most nonprofit direct marketing audiences skew older, this is particularly salient for us.

There are four key ways that consistency can work well for you in your direct marketing efforts:

  1. Getting your foot in the door. A small act toward your cause can cause a person to believe that they are the type of person who supports your cause.  This can be an email to their legislator putting up a sign of support, or downloading your materials.  Any small step can be referenced in asks for further, difference, and more valuable asks.  One of the executives I’ve had the honor of working with and for says “if you want to get money, ask for advice; if you want to get advice, ask for money.”There is a concern among some that so-called slactivism – taking on issues online by the least time-consuming means possible hurts “real” efforts.  I would argue that not only have well-run online campaigns changed hearts, minds, and/or votes, but also that these campaigns lend themselves to commitment-based follow-ups with language like “you’ve stood with us before; will you stand with us again” that uses commitment tactics.
  2. Flattery.  This should be easy, in that your donors and supporters are the people who make your valuable mission possible.  Telling them that, however, is not done often enough.  There was a recent quality study that looked at how recalling good deeds affected giving.  They found that when the study subjects primed themselves by recalling their past good deeds and perceive themselves as strongly moral people, they gave twice as many charitable donations as participants who recalled bad deeds.
  3. Playing back consistency. This can be as simple as variable copy letting the person know you know how long they have been giving.  After all, if you are told that “for 14 years, you have stood alongside poor suffering discarded stuffed animals,” who can resist a 15th year?
  4. Honoring consistency. Sending a communication on the anniversary of someone’s initiation with an organization not only gives them a nice feeling, it also reinforces that they are the type of person who gives to organizations like you.  Similarly, published donor rolls are both a great recognition tool and an advertisement on behalf of that’s person’s donation to you.

You should not rest exclusively on consistency’s laurels – expecting someone to give to you just because they have always given is a fool’s errand.  However, you probably noticed that many of the above techniques mix the reminder of the consistency with a reminder of the impact that someone is having or how good it feels to give.  That’s a good way to mix consistency with liking, which is what we’ll talk about tomorrow.

Influence in direct marketing: commitment and consistency