Great piece. I'm curious - how much do you think things like this would apply to other activities than fundraising, like campaigning/persuasion, public advocacy, etc? Obviously matching isn't relevant but the identifiable victim effect and drop in the bucket effects do seem relevant.
Glad you like the piece!
The identifiable victim effect and drop in the bucket effect would apply in a similar fashion. However, while this may seem obvious, I want to be super-clear and add the caveat to remember to also apply the strategy of learning about your audience. For instance, advocacy targeting political officials would be quite different from advocacy targeting the public more broadly.
The approaches would be different. As an example, if you want to convince a politician to direct money toward a cause that suffers from the "drop in the bucket effect," provide her/him with talking points and stories s/he can use to communicate this to her/his constituents, as opposed to trying to use stories to convince the actual politician.
Peter, if you have some additional perspectives on this topic, please jump in.
Great, thanks for your and Peter's comments. My guess would also be that these things are more helpful for getting specific actions by people who already agree (e.g. getting people to become advocates) than persuasion since in the context of charitable giving most people are already persuaded it's a good idea.
Thanks zdgroff :)
To my knowledge, all of these, bar matching, are good rules of thumb to work off for virtually all contexts where you are attempting to encourage prosocial (i.e., helping/other serving) behavior (i.e., volunteering, philanthropy, or activism on behalf of others) to the general public.
However, as Gleb points out, the most effective persuasion is very much about tailoring the appeal to the specific context, such as the people involved. For instance, if you were targeting people who were low in persuadability, high in persuasion knowledge, or need for cognition etc., then you might be better off going with something that focused on statistical/quantitative information rather than creating empathy by focusing on individual victims. That sort of target audience might see through this and be unaffected, or even dissuaded as they experience reactance at feeling manipulated.
Once I can free up some time, I intend to produce a lot more of persuasion guidelines, hopefully with Gleb and other collaborators (if I can keep/get them).
Summary/TL;DR: Charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. Drawing on academic research across different fields, this article highlights four common mistakes that fundraisers for effective charities should avoid and suggests potential solutions to these mistakes. 1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics; 2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors; 3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors; 4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.
Co-written by Gleb Tsipursky and Peter Slattery
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Stefan Schubert, Scott Weathers, Peter Hurford, David Moss, Alfredo Parra, Owen Shen, Gina Stuessy, Anthony Obeyesekere and other readers who prefer to remain anonymous for providing feedback on this post. The authors take full responsibility for all opinions expressed here and any mistakes or oversights. Versions of this piece will be published on The Life You Can Save blog and the Intentional Insights blog.
Cross-posted to Less Wrong.
Intro
Charities that use their funds effectively to make a social impact frequently struggle to fundraise effectively. Indeed, while these charities receive plaudits from those committed to measuring and comparing the impact of donations across sectors, many effective charities have not successfully fundraised large sums outside of donors focused highly on impact.
In many cases, this situation results from the beliefs of key stakeholders at effective charities. Some think that persuasive fundraising tactics are “not for them” and instead assume that presenting hard data and statistics will be optimal as they believe that their nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself.
The belief that a nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself can be very harmful to fundraising efforts as it overlooks the fact that donors do not always optimise their giving for social impact. Instead, studies suggest that donors’ choices are influenced by many other considerations, such as a desire for a warm glow, social prestige, or being captured by engrossing stories. Indeed, charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. For example, while one fundraiser collected over $700,000 to remove a young girl from a well and save a single life, most charities struggle to raise anything proportionate for causes that could save many more lives or lift thousands out of poverty.
Given these issues, the aim of this article is to use available science on fundraising and social impact to address some of the common misconceptions that charities may have about fundraising and, hopefully, make it easier for effective charities to also become more effective at fundraising. To do this it draws on academic research across different fields to highlight four common mistakes that those who raise funds for effective charities should avoid and suggest potential solutions to these mistakes.
Don’t forget individual victims
Many fundraisers focus on using statistics and facts to convey the severity of the social issues they tackle. However, while fact and statistics are often an effective way to convince potential donors, it is important to recognise that different people are persuaded by different things. While some individuals are best persuaded to do good deeds through statistics and facts, others are most influenced by the closeness and vividness of the suffering. Indeed, it has been found that people often prefer to help a single identifiable victim, rather than many faceless victims; the so-called identifiable victim effect.
One way in which charities can cover all bases is to complement their statistics by telling stories about one or more of the most compelling victims. Stories have been shown to be excellent ways of tapping emotions, and stories told using video and audio are likely to be particularly good at creating vivid depictions of victims that compel others to want to help them.
Don’t overemphasise the problem
Focusing on the size of the problem has been shown to be ineffective for at least two reasons. First, most people prefer to give to causes where they can save the greatest portion of people. This means that rather than save 100 out of 1,000 victims of malaria, the majority of people would rather use the same or even more resources to save all five out of five people stranded on a boat or one girl stranded in a well with the same amount of resources, even if saving 100 people is clearly the more rational choice. People being reluctant to help where they feel their impact is not going to be significant is often called the drop in the bucket effect.
Second, humans have a tendency to neglect the scope of the problem when dealing with social issues. This is called scope insensitivity: people do not scale up their efforts in proportion to a problem’s true size. For example, a donor willing to give $100 to help one person might only be willing to give $200 to help 100 people, instead of the proportional amount of $10,000.
Of course charities often need to deal with big problems. In such cases one solution is to break these big problems into smaller pieces (e.g., individuals, families or villages) and present situations on a scale that the donor can relate to and realistically address through their donation.
Don’t assume that matching donations is always a good way to spend funds
Charitable fundraisers frequently put a lot of emphasis on arranging for big donors to offer to match any contributions from smaller donors. Intuitively, donation matching seems to be a good incentive for givers as they will generate twice (sometimes three times) the social impact for donating the same amount. However, research provides insufficient evidence to support or discourage donation matching: after reviewing the evidence, Ben Kuhn argues that its positive effects on donations are relatively small (and highly uncertain), and that sometimes the effects can be negative.
Given the lack of strong supporting research, charities should make sure to check that donation matching works for them and should also consider other ways to use their funding from large donors. One option is to use some of this money to cover experiments and other forms of prospect research to better understand their donors’ reasons for giving. Another is to pay various non-program costs so that a charity may claim that more of the smaller donors’ donations will go to program costs, or to use big donations as seed money for a fundraising campaign.
Don't forget to empower donors and help them feel good
Charities frequently focus on showing tragic situations to motivate donors to help. However, charities can sometimes go too far in focusing on the negatives as too much negative communication can overwhelm and upset potential donors, which can deter them from giving. Additionally, while people often help due to feeling sadness for others, they also give for the warm glow and feeling of accomplishment that they expect to get from helping.
Overall, charities need to remember that most donors want to feel good for doing good and ensure that they achieve this. One reason why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was such an incredibly effective approach to fundraising was that it gave donors the opportunity to have a good time, while also doing good. Even when it isn’t possible to think of a clever new way to make donors feel good while donating, it is possible to make donors look good by publicly thanking and praising them for their donations. Likewise it is possible to make them feel important and satisfied by explaining how their donations have been key to resolving tragic situations and helping address suffering.
Conclusion
Remember four key strategies suggested by the research:
1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics
2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors
3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors
4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.
By following these strategies and avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will not only provide high-impact services, but will also be effective at raising funds.
P.S. This article is part of the EA Marketing Resource Bank project lead by Intentional Insights and the Local Effective Altruism Network, with support from The Life You Can Save.
[Comment cross-posted to LessWrong]
[I will use "Effective Altruists" or "EAs" to refer to the people who self-identify as members of the community, and "effective altruists" (without capitalization) for people to whom effectiveness matters a lot in altruism, regardless of whether they self-identify as EAs.]
I think this post makes some important and valuable points. Even if not novel, the concise summary here could make for a good WikiHow article on how to be a more effective fundraiser. However, I believe that this post falls short by failing to mention, let alone wrestle with, the tradeoffs involved with these strategies.
I don't believe there is a clear and obvious answer to the many tradeoffs involved with adopting various sales tactics that compromise epistemic value. I believe, however, that not even acknowledging these tradeoffs can lead to potentially worse decisions.
My points below overlap somewhat.
First, effective altruists in general, and EAs in particular, are a niche segment in the philanthropic community. The rules for selling to this niche can differ from the rules of selling to the general public. So much so that sales tactics that are considered good for the general public are actively considered bad when selling to this niche. Putting an identifiable victim may help with, say, 30% of potential donors in the general public, but alienate 80% of potential donors among effective altruists, because they have (implicitly or explicitly) learned to overcome the identifiable victim effect. In general, using messaging targeted at the public for a niche that is often based, implicitly or explicitly, on rejecting various aspects of such messaging, is a bad thing. A politician does not benefit from taking positions held by the majority of people all the time; rather, whereas some politicians are majoritarian moderates, others seek specific niches where their support is strong, often with the alienation of a majority as a clear consequence (for instance, a politician in one subregion of a country may adopt rhetoric and policies that make the politician unpopular countrywide but guarantee re-election in that subregion). Similarly, not every social network benefits from adopting Facebook's approach to partial openness and diversity of forms of expression. Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter have each carved a niche based on special features they have.
Second, in addition to the effect in rhetorical terms, it's also important to consider the effect in substantive terms on how the organizations involved spend their money and resources, and make decisions. Ideally, you can imagine a wall of separation: the organization focuses on being maximally effective, and a separate sales/fundraising group optimizes the message for the general public. However, many of the strategies suggested here actually affect the organization's core functions. Pairing donors with individual recipients significantly affects the organization's operations on the ground, raising costs. Could this in the long run lead to e.g. organizations selecting to operate in areas where recipients have characteristics that make them more interesting to donors to communicate with (e.g., they are more familiar with the language of the donor's country?). I don't see a way of making overall effectiveness, in the way that many EAs care about, still the dominant evaluation criterion if fundraising success is tied heavily to other outreach strategies.
Third (building somewhat on the first), insofar as there is a tradeoff between being able to sell more to effective altruists versus appealing more to the general public, the sign of the financial effect is actually ambiguous. The number of donors in the general public is much larger, but the amount that they donate per capita tends to be smaller. One of the ingredients to EA success is that its strength lies not so much in its numbers but in the depth of convictions of many self-identified EAs, plus other effective altruists (such as GiveWell donors). People who might have previously donated a few hundred dollars a year for an identifiable victim may now be putting in tens of thousands of dollars because the large-scale statistics have touched them in a deeper way. GiveWell moved $103 million to its top charities in 2015, of which $70 million was from Good Ventures (that's giving away money from a Facebook co-founder) and another $20 million is from individual donors who are giving amounts in excess of $100,000 each. To borrow sales jargon, these deals are highly lucrative and took a long time to close. Closing them required the donor to have high confidence in the epistemic rigor from a number of donors, many of whom were probably jaded by psychologically pitch-perfect campaigns. I'm not even saying that GiveWell's reviews are actually rigorous, but rather, that the perception of rigor surrounding them was a key aspect to many people donating to GiveWell-recommended charities.
Fourth, if the goal is to spread better, more rational giving habits, then caving in to sales tactics that exploit known forms of irrationality hampers that goal.
None of these imply that the ideas you suggest are inapplicable in the context of EA or for effective altruists in general. Nor am I suggesting that EAs (or effective altruists in general) are bias-free and rational demigods: I think many EAs have their own sets of biases that are more sophisticated than those of the general public but still real. I also think that many of the biases, such as the identifiable victim, can actually be epistemically justified somewhat, and you could make a good epistemic case for using individual case studies as not just a sales strategy but something that actually helps provide yet another sanity check (this is sort of what GiveWell tried to do by sponsoring field trips to the areas of operation of its top charities). You could also argue that the cost of alienating some people is a cost worth bearing in order to achieve a somewhat greater level of popularity, or that a wall of separation is not that hard to achieve.
But acknowledging these tradeoffs openly is a first step to letting others (including the orgs and fundraisers you are targeting) make a careful, informed decision. It can also help people figure out new, creative compromises. Perhaps, for instance, showing an identifiable victim and, after people are sort-of-sold, then pivoting to the statistics, provides the advantages of mass appeal and epistemic rigor. Perhaps there are ways to use charities' own survey data to create composite profiles of typical beneficiaries that can help inform potential donors as well as appeal to their desire for an identifiable victim. Perhaps, at the end of the day, raising money matters more than spreading ideas, and getting ten million people to donate a few hundred dollars a year is better than the current EA donor profile or the current GiveWell donor profile.
Hi Vipul,
Thank you for your comprehensive and well thought out comment. Sorry for my delay in response - I have been sick and busy.
The aim of this article, at least for me, was to provide some sort of a wiki-how for how to generally be effective at fundraising. I think it does a reasonable job in that regard and I am not sure if a discussion of tradeoffs would fit well with the format and aims.
With that said, I think that your insights are very valuable for us to consider. You have made several points that I realize I need to think more about (for example the differences in operational costs for different approaches, and the need to consider the amount that EAs give as an argument against their small numbers). Thanks for that. In particular I now recognise to a greate extent the potential tradeoff issues for arguments 2 & 4 as these points related to approaches that might work better for the general public but be less effective at persuading EAs. For 1 I think that there is no serious challenge, nor tradeoff, in combining statistics and emotional persuasion - most of the givewell charities do this to differing extents.
I will definitely consider writing a follow up article which discussed potential tradeoffs in more detail. Even if I don't directly build on the above article I will keep the comments in mind when writing/advising about similar topics.
Would it be possible to combine individual stories and general statistics? If I tell you there are X number of children dying from malaria, you may want to know what it is like to die from malaria. If I show you a video of one child dying from malaria, you may want to know how many other children are in a similar situation. If individual stories do have some usefulness, then would it be a good use of money for an EA organization to make some short films about the stories of individual children dying from malaria? It could bring people into the movement the same way that undercover videos of factory farms bring people into the animal movement. If people who are already in the movement are more likely to respond positively to a different type of appeal, could we target different types of appeals to different audiences? I did a quick search on YouTube for videos about malaria, and I found way fewer videos than I know are out there about factory farming.
Excellent point, upvoted. Thanks for constructive criticism of the points made here, it's really helpful! This is exactly the kind of dialogue we were hoping for :-)
Peter and I wrestled with a number of issues you brought up, and ended up deciding to write an essay that went against the grain in the EA movement itself of focusing only on statistics, since there is so much literature on this topic already. We didn't want to deal with the ground that was previously covered, but I recognize it would have been helpful to make more of an effort to describe the tradeoffs involved.
Several of the things discussed in this comment were touched on in the essay. For instance, the difference between communicating to people more oriented toward effectiveness, the small minority of EA participants, versus those more oriented toward emotions, the large majority of those who give, was covered in these sections: "while fact and statistics are often an effective way to convince potential donors, it is important to recognize that different people are persuaded by different things. While some individuals are best persuaded to do good deeds through statistics and facts, others are most influenced by the closeness and vividness of the suffering" and also "experiments and other forms of prospect research to better understand their donors’ reasons for giving." I acknowledge this could have been made more explicit.
Regarding messaging to different groups, we intended this essay to show folks fundraising for effective charities how to speak to non-EA participants. At the same time, this essay has the meta-function of helping EA participants not be put off by emotionally engaging messages conveyed by effective charities. As EA members, we believe we should optimize for money flowing to effective causes, and be happy about effective charities using such strategies in their fundraising, while ourselves relying on GiveWell and other well-reputed charity evaluators. In general, charities should use segmented messaging, with different messages for different audiences.
To Peter and I, this is a matter of the inference gap. If we can encourage people to give to effective charities and use GiveWell and similar EA-themed charity evaluators such as Animal Charity Evaluators, folks will likely grow in their epistemic rigor in assessing charities, slowly crossing the inference gap. However, this is something that deserves a much larger treatment to uncover similar issues.
Good point about the challenges involved in optimizing for individual victims! Notice that Peter and I did not suggest that charities should change their programming in any way, but simply adjust their messaging. I do see the danger you point to, and it's something to watch out for.
Thanks again for your helpful comments, and Peter, please jump in if you have further thoughts.
What I would be interested in is a follow-up post where you discuss the various trade-offs, how one might make them, what the implications of each are, etc. As it stands now, your post just doesn't seem very useful or actionable. But it may be a nice starting point that you can build on in the future.
I also think that some of the stylistic simplifications that you engage in might be well-optimized for publishing in mass media like Time Magazine or Huffington Post, but potentially hurt your credibility when posted in a narrower context like the Effective Altruism Forum (or LessWrong, where you cross-posted this). I would recommend setting higher standards both for epistemic rigor and for the level of detail of your actual content when posting here, and preempting objections better (something that may not matter when you are writing for an audience that is totally new to your ideas and have limited space).
Good points, will keep these in mind!