story telling

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?

Make your donor fill in the blanks

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What’s brown and sticky?

This is my wife’s favorite joke in the world.  And it puts me in mind of the power of either asking the person who gets your communication to fill in the blanks or evoking their curiosity, compelling them to read on.

Of course the answer is at the end.  How would I do a blog post about building interest through questions and not put the answer at the end?

While it may be fatal to our feline companions, curiosity is a basic human motivator.  Jerome Kagan, one of the forefathers of development psychology found in a 1972 paper that what he termed “uncertainty resolution” is a primary motivator of human behavior.  We are hardwired to want to know.

This can work to our advantage in direct marketing.  More and more research indicators that the donating decision isn’t a yes/no dyad; it’s a series of microconversions that lead up to the act of pulling out the credit card/checkbook/wallet/etc. and giving the gift of a life saved or changed.

Our goal, then, is to shepherd the potential donor through the little steps that lead to that big step.  One of these is often the decision to open, whether it’s a physical or virtual envelope.

A good question in a subject line or intriguing statement in teaser copy can help draw in a prospect.  One of my favorite subject lines of all time was one that was intended to show our gratitude, but could be read one of two ways:

Look what you’ve done

When you opened the email, it was telling the story of what the person’s support had meant: the small dent they put in the world that year.

But I’d be surprised if at least some of the people who opened it (and it had a 25%+ open rate) didn’t think we were saying:

jerk

Incidentally, you might think of this as a bait and switch, but not shockingly, no one complained about being tricked into being thanked profusely.

You can also create an information gap.  Think of the teaser of your local news: “Coming up after the break: what common household object could kill you today?”  Sometimes, asking the question that your email aims to answer can get people to read and read all the way through.  Just like brown and sticky things.

There’s a specific manifestation of completionism that is particularly interesting.  It started with Austrian waiters.

See?  “It started with Austrian waiters.”  You can’t help but read on to resolve the uncertainty that comes with a statement like that.

Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was watching waiters in Vienna.  She noticed that their memory was astoundingly good for orders that were in progress, but very bad for those that were already served.  She went back to the lab and found that our memories work well for unfinished or incomplete things (know as the Zeigarnik effect).  Subsequent testing has shown it works best for tasks that are very important to a person.

There are a good number of ways to deploy this:

  • Don’t put a period (or God help you, an exclamation point) on the end of your subject line.  Punctuation there (other than a question mark) signals that the thought is complete and you need not read on.
  • Test out two-step opt-ins.  This is the not only the perfect compromise by the people on your Web site that want to reduce form friction and the ones who think you need your participants middle initial and blood type (you don’t; the first people are right).  Simply have the person fill out the most basic information on the first screen (usually just email address).  Then ask for some of the important information on screen two, with a big friendly opt-in button (note: it should not say opt-in) right there for the taking.
  • Finally, you should end your content with an idea that the content will continue on in another letter, post, email, etc..  There’s a reason every Bond movie ends with “James Bond will return” — there’s always more to the story.  So tune in tomorrow for the end of story week when we talk about story arcs and hero’s journeys.


* What’s brown and sticky?  A stick.

Make your donor fill in the blanks

What the Greeks have to teach us about fundraising rhetoric

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Classic rhetoric structures almost always have no place in fundraising letters.  We govern largely in prose, not poetry.  In an effort to simplify, the flowery and verbose take a back seat to hard-punching Anglo-Saxon words of action.

But there are a few classical rhetorical devices worth knowing for even the humblest of appeals.

The first is that we tend to remember things in opposing twos and common threes.

For those of you keeping score at home, having opposing pairs is called antithesis.  The most famous of these is “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”  Many forget that Dickens then went on in that vein for quite some time, showing that he was paid by the word.

These opposing pairs can be a powerful way of setting an expectation and then denying it.  An opening sentence could be something like “Mary and John had long dreamed of owning their own home; little did they know that dream would become a nightmare” then going on to talk about the predatory lending practices that did them in and how you want to solve them.  While not a true antithesis (as those tend to have the same rhetorical structure), we tend to remember pairs of things.

We also remember three things if they are in a similar structure (known as tricolon).  We wouldn’t remember how Julius Caesar took Gaul if he just said “check Gaul off the list.  Conquered it.”  But because he came, he saw, and he conquered, it’s memorable.  We remember Churchill’s blood, sweat, and tears.  What we forget is that Churchill actually asked for blood, toil, sweat, and tears.  Even a master rhetorician as he went a rhetoric bridge too far.  We aren’t equipped to remember four things together.

14c14v

For our purposes in writing, the rule of three often applies well to adjectives.  A strong three adjective pile-up can add emphasis, focus, and detail to a sentence.

An additional rhetorical device that is very useful is intentionally grammatical mistakes (catachresis, if you are feeling fancy).  Some effective ones:

  • Saying “over” when you technically mean “more than.”
  • Avoiding your brand speak (e.g., ® and ™ and capitalizing many a word, as if they were special)
  • And starting sentences with “and” or “but.”

When in doubt, ask if it’s how people speak.  If it is, you are probably fine.

Yes, your copywriters will run a river of red ink through these.  Ignore them, unless they are prepared to pay you the difference in donations.

Finally, alternating hypotaxis and parataxis can be effective at getting people to think about what they’ve read.  In English, this means mixing up your long sentences with subordinated clauses (your flowery sentences designed to evoke a mood) with short ones.  This breaks up the mind and allows for some rest between longer orations.

Most of the other rhetorical devices you can keep; a fundraising letter full of alliteration or written in iambic pentameter is too cute by more than half.  But these help keep attention.  And that’s our goal.

What the Greeks have to teach us about fundraising rhetoric

The four American stories

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Your English teacher probably told you at some point about types of stories: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus society, etc.  English teachers like this may or may not be why so few movies pass the Bechdel test.

hickey-bechdel-11-0

Anyway, there is a taxonomy of storytelling I prefer to these types of conflicts — it’s the four American stories discussed by Robert Reich in Tales of a New America.  Those stories are:

  1. The mob at the gates.  The enemy is out there and we are in here.  We are a beacon to others, but we are fragile unless we arm ourselves against the barbarian horde who want to destroy us and our way of life.
  2. The triumphant individual.  This is the person who made her own bootstraps and pulled herself up by them.  These stories include pluck, grit, gumption, not to mention moxie and spunk.  It’s hard works, late nights, and early mornings.  It’s Abe Lincoln and Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger.  It’s Rocky and Rudy and the venerated entrepreneur.  
  3. The benevolent community.  This is neighbors coming together to help.  It’s the end that we are generally good at heart and will come together as one people to solve the tough problems.  
  4. The rot at the top.  These can be aristocrats, bureaucrats, banks, the 1%, the conspiracy of the day.  These people in high places are corrupt, decadent, and reckless and the keep their boot on us all.

In their raw forms, these are the intersections of two dichotomies: optimistic versus pessimistic and few versus many.

Few stories are only one of these and powerful ones intertwine them.  A classic example of these is the ebb and flow of the fortunes of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.  In one scene, he defends his bank on his own (triumphant individual) against a bank run (the mob at the gates) engineered by Mr. Potter (the rot at the top) and triumphs when his neighbors agree their money is best kept in their neighbors’ houses (the benevolent community).  

So, how do you craft your nonprofit’s story and people’s places in it?  Some implications:

  • You want to yin with your yang in temperament.  An unrelentingly positive communication leaves no thought that there is still a need.  An unrelentingly negative one makes a person want to take a bath, not try to create their own hero story.  I would recommend making sure you are both heroing your donor (whether you cast them as the triumphant individual or part of the benevolent community depends on their personal bend) and talking about the threat you face, whether from without or within.
  • Like temperament, I also find that it’s good to have few versus many in opposition.  True, two evenly matched individuals or equally sized armies can make for good stories.  But when one individual stands up for what is right against the masses (there’s a narrative reason we like when the crowd isn’t chanting Rocky’s name at the beginning of the fight, especially when fighting godless Commies) or when a people throw the bums out, you have a truly gripping story.  
  • Everything that isn’t in a category here is noise.  You’ll note that there isn’t a storytelling category for talking about how great your programs are, for the same reason that the benevolent community story of a barn-raising doesn’t dwell on the awesomeness of the hammers.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about some tricks to make your story more compelling.

The four American stories

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

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

Scope insensitivity and direct marketing: why one beats many

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There is a famous study in nonprofit marketing that shows that an appeal that tells the story of a child does better than an appeal that tells that same story with information about the general problem of poverty in Africa. Even more oddly, a story of one boy did as well as the story of one girl; both did better than the story of the boy and the girl. The study is here and it is both fascinating and disheartening.

We humans think in simple narrative. We are used to hearing a story of a person (then using availability bias, which we talked about, to generalize). When we hear the story of a person, we react to it with emotion and affect. When we hear the story of many people, we react to it with logic and calculation. Or as Stalin put it: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”*

engaging-millennials-as-organ-donors-june-13-2011-35-728

Image credit here. Odd that Stalin and Mother Teresa had similar sentiments on this. And I don’t think anyone has ever seen them in the same room at the same time…**

Unfortunately, this leads to us (in theory) misallocating our resources. Vox did an illustration of the types of cancer people donate to, versus what they die of.

fundrasing4disease

Image credit here.

This seems to focus on special events and looks at one organization per disease, so it isn’t perfect but is emblematic of this problem. In 2010, the humanitarian aid response to the Haiti earthquake (which affected 3 million people) was more than 3 billion dollars. The flood in Pakistan (which affected an estimated 20 million people) received only 2.2 billion dollars. (study here)  People donate relatively the same amount to save 2,000, 20,000, and 200,000 birds.

So the rule you could get from this is to tell only one story at a time. Which is not a bad rule.

However, your organization likely has a scope you want to achieve. You don’t just want to help one person. You want to help one person, then another, then another, etc., until your problem is solved and you can take up golf or something.

So how do you talk about scope without turning off your donors?

One way is to talk about scope and statistics, but to do it with the right donors. I would point you to the post I did about a month ago about the study that shows that statistics depress response among smaller donors, but increase it among larger donors. Thus, you can save it for the right audience.

Another solution that was interesting to me came from a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. 

At first, they just found what we’ve been talking about: single identified victim works better than large numbers of victims. Scope blindness in action.

However, you can get people to donate more to large numbers of victims if the victims are seen to be entitative.

This was the point in reading the study that I had to pull out the dictionary. I thought that entitative meant “similar to a walking talking tree from Lord of the Rings.”***

In reality, “entitative” means how much people consider something to be a coherent whole. This can be helped by group membership. In the study, they found that donations to help children were greater when the children were part of the same family, instead of random so-and-sos.

Similarly, they asked about saving butterflies, showing butterflies either flying randomly (low entitativity) or together (high entitativity). The butterfly flock (is that a thing?) raised 69% more on average.

They also found when that in-group had positive qualities, people were more likely to donate. Specifically, when the starving children in Africa were said to be in the same prison, rather than the same family, the group dynamic hurt donations rather than helping them.

So if you are going to talk about multiple people, try to frame them as part of the same in-group and make that in-group as positive as possible. Then, and seemingly only then, will you be able to tell more than one story and get more donations instead of fewer.
* I’d heard a different pithier version of this also (one where if you kill one person, you are a murderer; if you kill a million, you are a conqueror). However, this one seems to have the greatest basis in fact according to Quote Investigator.

** This is a joke, of course. This seems obvious, but one can not be too careful on the Internet. Clearly, Stalin is the evil twin of Mother Teresa.

*** Yes, I know that the ents aren’t really trees. They are treelike guardians that take on the shape of the trees they herd. But I’m trying to get everyone to read to the end of this, not just people who are as nerdy as I am.

Scope insensitivity and direct marketing: why one beats many