What if I
gave you $100 to donate to either (a) Sandra, a young, homeless girl
whose parents abandoned her, or (b) the overall homelessness plight' Who
would you give the money to' Most of you will pick Sandra even though
donating to "homelessness" would go to people in a similar situation to
Sandra. Why' Because we're hard-wired to care more about a victim we can
identify with than a large number of people or faceless statistics, no
matter how grim. That's why, according to academics, people stand by and
do nothing or do not intervene early enough in the face of great
tragedies, like the genocide in Rwanda. It's impossible to comprehend
800,000 individuals. They're just "lots and lots of dots."
We don't lose sleep over genocide, but we're deeply affected by one
person's story, like the disappearance of
Madeleine McCann. This isn't right or wrong, it's simply a
fact about how people comprehend individual lives. To reluctantly quote
Josef Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."
Our brains are programmed to tune out large numbers of people and
instead focus on single individuals. This tells us a lot about why we
support certain causes and why, for example, 33 Chilean miners received
more press coverage than 20 million flood-affected Pakistanis. The fewer
the number of people the more "real" a story becomes.
To prove this theory, researchers conducted an experiment in which they
gave people the opportunity to donate up to $5 to Save the Children.
They could chose which area of the charity's work the money would go
toward: (a) an identifiable victim (African girl Rokia); (b) statistical
victims (starvation in Africa); or (c) identifiable victim with
statistics (Rokia + starvation stats). Donations to an identifiable
victim, Rokia, generated more than twice as much money as donations to a
statistical portrayal of starvation in African. Even adding statistics
to Rokia's story reduced the donation amount. Other research found that
adding just one extra person to the appeal reduced the amount of the
donation. The more people involved the less we are affected. People
don't like numbers when it comes to compassion.
This
awareness of human psychology has practical implications for charities
and fundraisers. Fundraising is all about understanding people's
motivations for supporting a cause -- is Anna donating to our charity
because she just wants to run 10k, or does she genuinely care about the
cause (or both)' Either way, her decision is rational and thought out.
The decision to support one person instead of many, however, is
unconscious. It has to do with the way we feel about an issue in an
instant rather than stepping back and taking a rational look at it.
There is something about the face and story of one individual that grabs
us and makes us want to take action.
So, to
maximize donations, fundraisers should focus their public appeals on one
person's story, accompanied by a powerful image.
In the
words of Mother Teresa, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I
look at the one, I will."
Jeremy
Douglas is a professional fundraising consultant. jerdouglas@gmail.com
' Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun |
