Using behavioral research to shape your marketing and fundraising

Katie Lord is Vice President of Nonprofit Development at Proof Positioning, a market research company that uses emotional research to better understand donors and motivate them to act for nonprofits. 

Katie and I talked recently about the disconnect between marketing and fundraising in nonprofits, as well as the impact of behavioral economics and emotional research on our ability to engage supporters and motivate them to take an action in support of our causes. 

Marketing vs. Fundraising

The role of marketing is to enable fundraising, volunteer recruitment, corporate sponsorship, etc. When you get down to it, every activity that is driven by marketing is a revenue action of one type or another. Either it generates a dollar of revenue (i.e., fundraising, sponsorship, etc.), or it replaces a dollar of cost (i.e., volunteerism).

 As a former nonprofit development leader herself, Katie has first-hand understanding of the challenges of navigating that divide between Marketing and Fundraising. One of our key takeaways in this discussion is the importance of developing shared goals and sharing revenue responsibility across both teams and departments. When marketing departments don’t have a shared responsibility for revenue generation, it often leads to decisions that aren’t in alignment with organizational strategic priorities — and that’s a big mistake. 

Katie makes the solid (and potentially controversial) point that, “fundraising isn’t all we do — but all we do depends on fundraising.”

This is an essential concept that we wrestle with a bit in our conversation. 

Behavioral Economics

We also discuss some very cool insights that she and her team have gleaned through their research work for nonprofits of all types, including:

1. According to Johns Hopkins, humans take (on average) 200 milliseconds to make a decision. After 400 milliseconds, it’s highly unlikely that you will change your mind after making a decision. This means that anything we do to complicate the decision-making process in our fundraising and marketing will very likely cause our donors NOT to take the desired action. 
2. Flowery or overly complicated language slows down brain function (see point #1 above) and delays decision-making. This reduces the likelihood of giving. 
3. If you want donors to give, and to give at high rates, you have to make your messaging and creative very simple and easy to understand. You can’t complicate it with internal-facing language, complex concepts, jargon, heavy statistics, etc., and still get the response you desire. 
4. We all have biases and we bring those to every interaction we have. As a fundraiser or marketer, you can use those to your advantage. For example, if you work in an animal welfare organization and you are capturing key data points, you should be able to determine which of your supporters are biased toward cats vs. dogs. Your messaging and design should speak to those two audiences differently, based on what you know about them. This kind of customization will go a long way in bonding those supporters to your cause, because it makes them feel like you truly know them.
5. Surveys can be incredibly valuable. In fact, Katie and I discuss the importance of a post-transaction survey that can help you assess how donors feel about your fundraising solicitation process, and increase the likelihood that they will continue giving to you in the future. It’s a pretty cool concept!

We tackle these and many other topics in this great conversation!