social proof

Mars, Venus, and social proof

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Here at Direct to Donor, we have a tradition – every 100th post anniversary, we take a look back at some past posts and update them with new information.  “Tradition” may be a bit strong, since we will hit 200 posts this week, but we’re working on it.

Back in February, we took a look at how women and men donate differently.  TL; DR?  Women generally donate more and more often.  Women respond best to social proof, clear injustice, and efficacy appeals; aligned self-interest worked best for men and worst for women.

However, there is a new study that may shed different light on the gender* dynamics of social proof.  In the original study, here’s the phrase researchers used to try to get men and women to donate in the social proof condition:

“When you give to CRP, you join your fellow citizens in helping to fight poverty. The poor are now being helped by record numbers of charitable givers across the country. You can join the movement to eliminate poverty with your contribution to CRP.”

As you can see, this doesn’t mention a specific amount – the social proof comes in the decision to donate, rather than the amount to donate.  The researchers in this case found that women donated more often to this type of appeal.

The reason I go through this set up is that there is also a study out that indicates something different.  This study from Croson, Handy, and Shang looked at a radio station call-in scenario.  Subjects were told, after making a $25 gift, that someone else had just donated either $10 or $50.

Croson and Shang have looked at this type of data in the past (here and here), finding that this type of social pressure/pull can significantly increase the amount given by a person.

Here, they asked subjects how much they think and average station listener would contribute and how much they would contribute in the next year.

It turns out that social norms did influence contributions, but almost entirely from men.  So men were more likely to use this social information to inform the amount they gave.

So, these sound like two opposing studies – one indicating that social norms work better on women; the other indicating they work better on men.

However, I think there is a way to reconcile these results.  It would appear that social norms – how a community is banding together to help fight poverty – are more influential for women than men when it comes to deciding whether to make a donation.  However, when the time comes to actually make the donation, women will keep their own counsel about how much to give more than men, who are more influenced by outside views.

This is an interesting area of research; I hope we can get research that is able to show a clearer direction.  In the meantime, I would keep appealing to men and men alone with enlightened self-interest and use social proofing as a strategy to anchor men to higher gift amounts.

 

* Technically, it’s sex dynamics, since the study appears to have looked only at a male-female dichotomy, but “Sex Dynamics” sounds like a book you would get on Kindle so no one would see you looking at the cover.

Mars, Venus, and social proof

It’s time to stop… vanity metrics

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I’m writing this during the South Carolina Republican primary.  The votes haven’t started being counted yet, but I know who is going to win.  Because I know that Ben Carson has 35% of the Facebook likes among GOP contenders in the state; Trump is second at 25%.  Thus, Carson will get approximately 35% of the vote.

What?  Doesn’t it work that way?  Facebook likes aren’t a reliable indicator of support, donations, interest, or almost anything else?

The bitter truth: Facebook likes are a vanity metric.  They have little to do with your ultimate goal of constituent acquisition, donor conversion, and world domination, yet people will still ask what that number is.  And when they hear it, they will nod, say that that’s a good number, and ask what we can do to increase it.

That’s when a tiny little part of you dies.

So, in our Things To Stop Doing, we have vanity metrics.  These metrics may make you feel good.  They may be easy to measure.  And some of them may feel like a victory.  But they bring you little closer to your goals.  We are creatures of finite capacity and time, so the act of measuring them, talking about them, or (worst of all) striving for them drains from things that actually matter.

Facebook likes and Twitter followers are probably some of the better-known vanity metrics.  But they are far from the only ones.  And while some of these are partly useful (e.g., Facebook likes is an indicator of a warm lead repository for marketing on the platform), there’s almost always a better measure.

Because it always comes back to what your goals are.  Usually, that goal is to get people to take an action. Your metrics should be close to that action or the action itself.

Without further ado, some metrics to stop measuring.

Web site visits.  Yes, really.  This is for a couple of reasons:

  1. Not all visitors are quality visitors.  If you’ve been using Web site visits as a useful metric, and wish to depress yourself, go to Google Analytics (or your comparable platform) and see how long visitors spend on your site.  Generally, you’ll find that half or more of your users are on your site for more than 30 seconds.  Are 30 seconds long enough for people to take the action you want them to take on your site?  Not usually (except for email subscribes).

  2. Not all visitors are created equal.  Let’s say you find that people coming to your site looking for a particular advocacy action sign up for emails 10% of the time; those who come looking for information about a disease sign up 5% of the time; those who look for top-line statistics sign up 1% of the time.  Which of these is the most valuable visitor?

    This isn’t a trick question.  You would rather have one person looking for advocacy actions than nine people looking for stats.  Except that the metric of Web site visits lumps them all into one big, not-very-useful bucket.

These are both symptoms of the larger problem, which is that if you had to choose between two million visitors, of whom 1% convert, and one million visitors, of whom 3% convert, you’d choose the latter.  Thus, potential replacements for this metrics are visits to particular pages on the Website where you have a good idea of the conversion rates, weighted Web traffic, and (most simply) conversions.

Mail acquisition volume.  You get the question a lot – how many pieces are we sending in acquisition?  Is it more or less than last year?  And it’s not a bad estimate as to a few different things about a mail program: are they committed to investing in mail donors?  Is the program growing or shrinking?  What are their acquisition costs?

But from a practical perspective, all of these things could be better answered by the number of donors acquired (and even better by a weighted average of newly acquired donors’ projected lifetime values, estimated from initiation amount and historical second gift and longer-term amounts, but that’s tougher).  A good rule of thumb is:

Never measure a metric that someone could easily game with a counterproductive action.

And you can do that with mail acquisition volume by going on a spending spree.  Of course, you can also do that with donors acquired, but it will spike your cost per donor acquired, which you are hopefully pairing with the number of donors acquired like we recommend in our pairing metrics post.

Time on site.  You notice that people are only spending an average of 1:30 on your Web site, so you do a redesign to make your site and content stickier.  Congratulations – you got your time on site up to 2:00!

Someone else notices that people are spending 2:00 on your Web site.  They work to streamline content, make it faster loading, and give people bite-sized information rather than downloading PDFs and such.  Congratulations – you got your time on site down to 1:30!

Therein lies the problem with time on site – whatever movement it makes is framed as positive when it could be random noise.  Or worse.  Your sticky site may just be slower loading and your bite-sized content may just be decreasing conversion.

So another rule of good metrics:

Only measure metrics where movement in a direction can be viewed as good or bad, not either/both.

Here again, conversions are the thing to measure.  You want people to spend the right amount of time on your site, able to get what they want and get on with their lives.  That Goldilocks zone is probably different for different people.

Email list size.  While you totally want to promote this in social proof (like we talked about with McDonalds trying to get cows to surrender), you actually likely want to be measuring a better metrics of active email subscribers, along the lines of people who have opened an email from you in the past six months.  These are the people you are really trying to reach with your messaging.

When you remove metrics like these from your reporting or, at least, downplay them, you will have fewer conversions with your bosses that ask you to focus on things that don’t matter.  That’s a win for them and a win for you.

I should mention that I am trying to build my active weekly newsletter subscribers.  Right now, we have an open rate of 70% and click-through rates of 20%+, so it seems (so far) to be content that people are enjoying (or morbidly curious about).  So I’m hoping you will join here and let me know what you think.

 

It’s time to stop… vanity metrics

Anchoring, ask strings, and the psychology of first impressions

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One of the most talked about cognitive biases, for online donations especially, is anchoring. Anchoring means we rely on the first piece(s) of information we get about something more than the last.

Where this comes into play most often, and intuitively, for nonprofit direct marketers is in ask strings. People tend to key on the first value of the ask string most. Ordering your asks from high to low will increase your average gift and decrease your response rate; low to high will do the opposite. In our The Science of Ask Strings post (which is currently the most visited post on the blog, so don’t be left out (we talked about fear of missing out yesterday…)), we saw single givers were more pliable on the anchor than multi givers. Single givers receive an anchor from you; multi givers have their anchor already in their minds.

This piece of information doesn’t have to be an all relevant. People were asked to recall the last two digits of their Social Security number, then tell how much they would pay for an item. Those with higher numbers gave higher prices by 60-120 percent. This is why if you have a focal point number in your piece, it’s good to make it higher than your average gift. If you usually say four people die every hour, move it to 96 people die every day; that 96, if highlighted, will ask as an unconscious anchor on giving.

Anchoring can tie very deeply to social proof. If you give people the impression that most people are doing a thing, that’s an anchor. If you give the impression that most people don’t give, that also is an anchor for not giving. Last time, I picked on Wikipedia’s fundraising for this; now it’s Charity Navigator’s turn:

CN social proof2

I think they think they trying to anchor people to give $50 or more and they may be increasing their average gift with this because of this. However, when the first thing I hear is that less than one percent of people give to Charity Navigator, I’m less likely to give. Or I would be if my personal likelihood were not already a negative number.

The anchoring/social proof crossover also supports letting people know what the average person like them donates. As you might guess, people who have their anchor set by social proof higher give more. What this study found is people are more influenced by what their in-group was doing than their out-group and thus more anchored by their giving. Thus, I would bet good money that “most people give X” beats no anchor and that “most Texans (or whatever) give X” beats “most people give X,” because it’s a closer in-group.

This also manifests in peer-to-peer fundraising. It’s vital to educate fundraisers that the most important gift they get will be their first one (ideally, the one they give to themselves). If that first gift is $100, they will almost certainly raise more than a person who gets a $10 initial gift. Since peer-to-peer fundraising is more giving to a person than giving to a cause, people want to know what a socially acceptable donation is. We want to tell them the right number.

It probably goes without saying, but don’t advertise average gift to people who give more than the average gift.

Finally, there is an anchor you might not think about that falls into the Blink category of quick reactions. You know that first impressions matter, but you may not know how fast is fast. Research shows that people form a solid impression of a Web site in 50 milliseconds.

For perspective, a blink is at least 100 milliseconds. So in the time of half a blink, people have judged your Web site.

So the big question here is what is your first impression? Especially for mobile, what loads first on your site (if anything)?

You may want to make sure that it is your name, what you do (in quick, not in mission statement, form), and a call to action (whether donation or not). Because a second is an eternity now to set your anchor.

Anchoring, ask strings, and the psychology of first impressions

Influence in direct marketing: social proof at work

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Observational comedy sometimes gets a bad rap as people complaining about airline food and never ending string of “what is the deal with X?”.  For my money, however, someone like a George Carlin or Jerry Seinfeld get to greater truths about the absurd reasons and non-reasons why we do what we do.

So for social proof, I’ll turn it over to Jerry Seinfeld to start:

99billion2006-05-20

 

Why is McDonald’s still counting? How insecure is this company? Forty million eighty jillion killion tillion….is anyone really impressed anymore? Oh eighty-nine billion sold! All right I’ll have one. I’m satisfied.

Who cares? I would love to meet the chairman of the board of McDonalds and say, look, “We all get it, ok, you’ve sold a lot of hamburgers, whatever the hell the number is, just put up a sign, ‘McDonalds, we’re doing very well. ‘”

What is their ultimate goal to have cows just surrendering voluntarily or something? Showing up at the door. “We’d like to turn ourselves in, we see the sign, we realize we have very little chance out there. We’d like to be a Happy Meal if that’s at all possible.”

This sign is here as a signifier of social proof.  The implication here is not trying to get cows to surrender – it’s to get people to surrender.  Social proof is when people assume that everyone else knows what they are doing and, as a result, they should do likewise.

If you want a workable definition of irony, check out the Wikipedia page for “social proof.”  Here’s a screen shot:

social proof

See that banner at the top?

wikipedia header

There’s a key counterproductive sentence in here (although there are other problems with this): “Only a tiny portion of our readers give.”

What Wikipedia is signaling, on top of this article about how people tend to do what other people do, is most people don’t donate to us – you shouldn’t either.

There is a famous study cited by Cialdini and many many other (in fact, it’s part of Yes!, another great book on influence) with the Arizona Petrified Forest.  They found that a sign that has negative social proof significantly increases the likelihood that someone will do something bad. In this case the sign said:

“Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, destroying the natural state of the Petrified Forest.”

In essence, this sign says out loud what your mom warned you about – everyone else is jumping off a bridge and you should too.

Yet Wikipedia is far from alone in using this tactic.  How many gap appeals have you seen that say, in essence, “not ask many people are donating as they had been; please give generously”?  These types of appeals are fraught with social proof peril.  Personally, I’ve only seen them be effective either when the gap is due to something outside of the nonprofit’s control (e.g., “you and people like you have been more generous this year than ever, but the loss of this government grant imperils…”) or when the gap is due to increased need (e.g., “Hurricane Oberhauser means that more people are homeless; can you help immediately?”).  To admit others aren’t supporting your nonprofit is counterproductive.

That said, social proof can be used for good.  People are more likely to support a nonprofit when the list of people supporting it before them is longer (see, for example, this study).  With major donor campaigns, it is common to have a quiet period where funds are raised to get to around 40% of the overall goal.  Donors during this period are told, correctly, that they will be helping with this effect.

But it works for small donors as well.  A challenge fund, in addition to creating scarcity/urgency, which we will talk more about, also communicates that other people are supporting this cause – you should too.  The thermometer on the side of walk pages works much better when there are people already supporting the cause.

Similarly, you may want to test “Join 324,224 members” instead of your “Become a member” button.  “Join” is in particularly a powerful word in this respect because it implies that you are becoming a part of something larger than yourself.

Pre-seeding campaigns works.  One nonprofit of my acquaintance starts recording donations for their year-end campaign in mid-November, but only puts the thermometer up in December, so that the social proof is in place when it is most likely to be helpful.

Another form of social proof is testimonials from your current donors.  A good donor story can be very effective in a newsletter.  One part of this that we’ll talk about more in the authority post is that it’s especially effective when it is a like person giving the testimonial – similar age, race, name, state, etc.  The message “people support this” is good; the message “people like me support this” is better.

Pictures also work well alongside testimonials.  A great study on what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” (whether something “feels” true, not necessarily whether it is true) found that having pictures alongside of a truth claim makes it feel more true.  Thus, if you can get the picture of the person making the testimonial, the testimonial will tend to ring more true.

Have you seen strong examples of social proof in action?  Please leave them in the comments – everyone else is.

Influence in direct marketing: social proof at work