Does donor education achieve anything? Here’s how to find out

Posted on October 3, 2011 by carolinefiennes

I ran a session this month with The Philanthropy Workshop, the flagship donor education programme invented by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and run in the UK by the Institute of Philanthropy. It’s one of numerous activities by advisors, private banks and universities to make donors better.

Do they work? There are two major problems to finding out.

First, the quality of a donor’s decisions are normally invisible to the donor themself. For instance, if they choose a programme which supports one child with the $100 they give whereas an alternative programme could have supported 25 children for that money, the ‘missed opportunity’ felt by the 24 children isn’t felt by the donor. [These are real numbers, from this work to increase school attendance in India.] The donor gets the same warm glow and cheery photos either way.  Hence bad decisions get made all the time, and since the donor doesn’t even know they’ve made a bad decision, there’s no mechanism for them to learn and improve. This itself is a giant topic.

The other problem is defining what a good donor is. Donors vary widely in their goals (improve education, provide bereavement care, reduce deforestation, to name a few), so comparing the end results they enable would be tricky indeed.

Now, we can take a leaf from the book of J-PAL, the research institute at MIT which studies the effectiveness of various approaches to alleviating extreme poverty. J-PAL doesn’t look at the mega-questions – whether aid breeds dependency or spawns poor governance, for example, which are rather ideological. Rather, it looks at discrete answerable questions about practical matters: how can we get these children immunised, what would these children to come to school, what if anything should we charge for anti-malarial bednets in Kenya?

By analogy, we could define some specific characteristics of good giving, and measure whether they’re affected by donor education. One such would be making unrestricted gifts: because almost invariably, money achieves more if it is given without restrictions.

So how can we measure whether donor education increases propensity to make unrestricted gifts? Here is one bad way. Just monitor the proportion of attendees’ gifts which were unrestricted before and after the course. This is bad because it wouldn’t indicate whether any observed change was due to the course: donors might have been influenced by, say, media coverage about giving. This method would leave us with no idea about why any change occurred. Another bad way is to compare the proportion of unrestricted gifts made by people who’ve done the course with the proportion made by people who haven’t. This is no good because it’s not hard to imagine that the kind of donors who elect to do a course are different in some meaningful ways from donors who don’t. That is, we’ve have a case of selection bias, which again gives us no idea about whether any observed change was attributable to the course.

A rather better way is a kind of randomised control trial – the ‘gold standard’ rigorous tests used for drug trials. It’s not complicated. Here’s what we’d do.

First, we’d talk to all the people who apply to come on a donor education course and ask them about the proportion of their grants in the last, say, year which had been unrestricted. Second, we’d randomly select from those applicant donors the set who would do the course. Third, after the course (or maybe a year after the course had finished), we’d again survey both sets about the proportion of their grants which had been unrestricted.

Voila. We’ve got a control group (the set who didn’t do the course) so can see what changes would (probably) have occurred anyway in the group which did the course; and we’ve got rid of the selection bias problem by choosing our course group at random from people all of whom had applied to be on the course.

Has this ever been done? I’d be fascinated.

Why comparing US and UK giving is totally unfruitful–>

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The good, and the weird, features of Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save

Posted on October 3, 2011 by carolinefiennes

‘How much should each of us give to help the world’s poor?’, asks the moral philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Life You Can Save. It’s a cracking book, with some great insights about poverty, effective solutions and the weirdness inside us all (ie, behavioural economics). Nonetheless, there were three respects in which I found the book peculiar.

First, the American-ness. ‘We Americans this’, ‘a survey of American found that’, ‘the average American this’, ‘American radio stations that’, ‘the New York Times the other’, and so on. Surely defeating global poverty will require people in all developed nations, not just in one, and so it’s kind of odd to alienate / ignore everybody else. Though he probably is addressing people in all developed nations, because Singer doesn’t refer to us at all (except as comparators to the US), it rather sounds as though we don’t count, or our giving is irrelevant or something. And that’s particularly weird coming from somebody who is himself not American and who, the very first page tells us, doesn’t live in America. Still, maybe his publisher decided that the main audience was in the US.

He should have fought them off, because the American-centricity of the language seriously undermines his work. Singer laments (rightly) the low levels of international giving by US individuals and by the US state, and it seems not unreasonable to imagine that this is partly because people in the US are simply less aware of the existence of other countries, or less familiar with their situations than one might hope. Indeed, Singer (rightly) explores how people give to causes with which they feel they have a connection, which feel proximate to them, and which they can envisage. By talking to his US audience as though they are the sole nation who exist, or at least who matter, surely he is perpetuating the isolationism which creates / reinforces the very problem he is trying to solve.

Professor Singer, if you read this, please explain. I’m hugely interested, not because I want to understand publishers but because your quest is such an important one.

Second, why did he publish it commercially? The front cover has a stamp saying “URGENT, URGENT, URGENT Acting Now to End World Poverty”, and the back cover claims that “For the first time in history, it is within our reach to eradicate world poverty”. Crickey – so we need to get the message of this book into as many hands and heads as possible, and pretty pronto. For which, commercial publishing at £14.99 a copy isn’t obviously the best route. When Professor David Mackay felt a similar urgency – to debunk the myth that our current attempts to produce ‘clean’ energy would meet our energy needs – he wrote a marvellous book and dishes it out for free, so as to minimise the barriers to people reading it.

Again, Professor Singer, please explain. If commercial publishing is, by your analysis, the best way to disseminate a message, then all those of us who are on missions to spread messages need to know that.

And third, the answer at which Peter Singer arrives is that we should all give 5% of our incomes, with a bit extra if you earn a lot. Five? It does seem kind of weird that after 164 pages of detail about how much poverty there is, about how we can solve it using these natty effective interventions we’ve now discovered, about wealth disparity, behavioural economics, blah blah, Singer seems to give up, saying that ‘oh that’s all jolly tricky’ and picks from the air a low number – no less than half what is in the Bible. Surely if we have a unique opportunity to “eradicate world poverty”, surely we should all dig deep for a while and nail it. The book is a peculiarly complex way of defending a pretty mild conclusion.

However, you can’t beat this book for its tour of the relevant bits of behavioural economics – that fascinating offshoot of the dismal science. We’d rather help one person than help ten. If somebody else isn’t helping, rather than thinking we should help (precisely because they’re not) we’ll decide that we shouldn’t help either. If we so much as see a dollar sign (or, if you don’t happen to be in the US, a pound sign, or yen sign, or Rand sign…), we become more less likely to give.

Fundraisers and charities need to know and use these insights. Even if they’re not in America.

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Why comparing giving in the US and in the UK is a total red herring

Posted on September 14, 2011 by carolinefiennes

If I had a pound for every time I’d heard people try to compare giving in the US and in the

UK, I’d have more pounds than is given in both together. It’s a rubbish comparison. Here’s why.

First, they normally compare solely the US and the UK. As though there were only two nations on Earth. It’s just lazy. Do you really not think we might also be able to learn something from other countries too?

Second, the comparison normally says ‘giving is higher in the US than here, so we should try to get our giving as high as theirs’. Any philosopher will tell you that an argument’s validity depends on its structure, independent of its content. So we can think of this statement as saying “Blah is higher in the US than here, so we should try to get our Blah as high as theirs.” Really? The rate of school shootings is higher in the US than here, so we should aspire to increase that? The proportion of ethnic minority men in prison is higher in the US than here. Carbon emissions per head are a lot higher in the US than here. And so absurdly on. Thus this ‘argument’ giving makes no sense.

Third, do you not think there might be just one or two other relevant differences between the UK and the US? You’ll remember from school that good experiments test only one thing at a time and keep everything else constant. Well, the US and the UK are hardly alike in every respect other than their rates of charitable giving. Cultural differences are vast, differences in social norms are vast, the role of the state versus the individual differs vastly. Citing the differences in giving levels with no consideration of the umpteen other differences is just lazy / stupid – extrapolating from the (kind of) similarity of our language to everything else.

Fourth, it’s the role of the state, stupid. In upstate New York, I was amazed a few years ago to see a sign saying “the next 5km of highway is cleaned courtesy of the [wherever I was] Rotary Club”. In Britain, every km of highway is cleaned courtesy of the government, that is to say, by the tax-payer. And thus, magically, every km of highway is cleaned, irrespective of whether there is a local Rotary Club. Notice that money given by / to the Rotary Club of Wherever I Was to clean highways counts as charitable giving, whereas the money ‘given’ to the taxman to clean UK highways doesn’t. That doesn’t show that the US is more generous, as claimed, just that the US allocates tasks differently between the state and the private citizen. It’s not obvious that a system in which your local highway might not get cleaned (if, for instance, there is no Rotary Club) is better than one in which it definitely will.

Fifth, it’s not even true, as often claimed, that the US is more generous than the UK. According to NCVO / CAF, whereas 73% of UK citizens give money, only 60% of US citizens do[i]. Or another way of looking at this, official overseas aid giving by the US is 18 cents for every $100 of Gross National Income, whereas in the UK it’s nearly three times that, at 51 cents If you add together giving to international development by government and private individuals in the US, you get 25 cents per $100, whereas in the UK, you get more than twice that, at 54 cents[ii].

Sixth (yes, really), the uses of this ‘charitable’ money are not exactly what you would choose if you were an alien arriving on our inequitable and disharmonious planet. I read a report some years ago (and now annoyingly can’t find) that analysed the amount of charitable giving in the US which went to ‘communities of which the donor is a member’ – churches, synagogues, universities and so on. About a third, from memory, and enough to wipe out the per capita differences between giving in the US and the UK.

You see this most markedly in giving to universities in the US. Harvard University was sitting on $37bn at the beginning of 2008[iii], almost all of which probably counted as charitable money. Is that giving supposed to somehow embellish the health of the nation, having great cashpiles sitting around in unaccountable institutions, managed by people paid $4.4 million?

And seventhly (a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever previously written) WHAT ABOUT EFFECTIVENESS? So bl**dy what if the US gives more if we haven’t established that they give it effectively? It’s not hard to give money in such a way that none of it does anything useful, and on the other hand, it is possible to give it just marvellously. A little given marvellously will produce more impact than loads given badly. The discussion about levels of giving is a measure of INPUT, not of the RESULT.

Please. Can we stop these nonsense comparisons and focus on what really matters: decent analysis which can help us to make the world better – by understanding how to make giving (and everything else) more effective.

Get more giving by selling it like chocolate—>

[i] The World Giving Index 2010

[ii] From The Live You Can Save, Peter Singer, page 34

[iii] Harvard endowment manager to retire, following shake-up, Boston Business Journal by Galen Moore, Friday, August 5, 2011

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Book: It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It

Posted on June 20, 2011 by carolinefiennes

It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It

Introductory discount! £12.99 (+ P&P. This is for the UK: for RoW, see below.)

‘The Freakonomics of the charity world – with better cartoons’ – Martin Houghton-Brown, CEO, Missing People

‘Great advice: inspiring, entertaining and much-needed’ – James Caan, Dragons’ Den panellist

‘A unique and very clear guide to a very complex topic, with insight for any donor’ – The Body Shop

‘Caroline Fiennes explains how to balance heart and mind for serious philanthropy. She emphasises with clarity the importance of evidence and economics for to maximise good deads per dollar‘ – Simon Singh, science writer

‘Whether you’re giving your own money, or raising money, and whether you’re giving a lot or a little, this delightful guide is essential.’  – Sir Ranulph Fiennes, sthe UK’s top celebrity fundraiser

‘Increasingly people see parallels between charity and business, so it’s refreshing and valuable that Caroline brings perspectives from elsewhere, including medicine, the military, politics, physics, history, genetics and psychology. A great read: any donor should read it and heed it.’ – Isabel Kelly, Int’l Director, Salesforce.com Foundation

What’s in this book? Table of contents.
It is also available on Kindle from here. (Note that publishers have almost zero control over pricing on Kindle.)

It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It is a guide to charitable giving – explaining how charities work, and giving advice about how best you can work with them to improve the world. It’s “exclusively for everyone” – relevant to you, your children, your hedge-fund-manager friend, big foundations, and corporate giving.

It includes advice on common situations:  how to choose a charity to put in your Will; whether to give anonymously, what is an intelligent response to a ‘chugger’ in the street, to being asked for sponsorship, to a request from your school or university.

It’s worth the effort: some charities achieve 25 times more with your money than others, and some ways of giving achieve 7 or 11 or 20 times as much with your donations. Using masses of examples and quirky stories, the book explains:

What you need to know about charities. For example: why are there so many of them, what they do in relation to government, the various ways that they improve the world, and how to understand their impact.

What you need to do. How to:

–          Find a good charity

–          Help it

–          Avoid hindering it

What to do if you’re giving a lot / as a family / in your company / as a foundation. For example, how to choose a focus area, how to get organised, the team you need, how to find a partner, how to track whether you’re being successful over time, and how to involve your colleagues.

The calculations used in the book are detailed here.

This is the Application form given in the book, which can be used by any donor.

For orders in Europe (excl. UK):

For orders outside Europe:

Endorsements:

Body Shop International: “Caroline’s insight into a very complex topic provides a clear understanding to not only the complexities of charitable giving, but also a guide as to the impact of the donation. Donations are made to make a difference, they are a personal choice and often very generous,  but there is not always an understanding of the impact or lack of impact they may have. This book provides a very clear guide for any donor, from the novice to major corporate institutions. It’s unique to find this level of information in one place, and will create pause for thought for many people.” 

*Why the quirky price? It’s a nod to the Charitable Uses Act of 1601, which forms the basis of much charitable law in the UK and around the world.

Which bank is running one of the worst giving programmes we’ve ever seen? –>

Posted in Promoting giving | 4 Comments

Why Eurostar’s charity partnership with the Ashden Awards is a very good idea*

Posted on June 17, 2011 by carolinefiennes

Partnering to create value 

Interested in fostering innovation, Eurostar has teamed up with the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy to create a new prize for local sustainable transport initiatives.

In principle, Eurostar could have created an infrastructure of its own – promoting the award, going out to find charities, getting some judges together, figuring out criteria, judging entries, creating some kind of award ceremony, getting press coverage of the award.

The Ashden Awards already has all that. By partnering with Ashden, Eurostar has saved itself all the bother of building it all, which (a)leaves more money in the kitty to help the great initiatives it finds and (b)leaves itself more time to help the great initiatives it finds. Plus Eurostar avoids painfully learning all the lessons about how to run an awards programme which Ashden has already learnt in its 11 year history.

“If you want to go far, go together” 

Great donors focus relentlessly on IMPROVING THE WORLD. They use anything and everything which helps with that. So they partner with other donors who know more than they do and share their existing infrastructure. They don’t let themselves get bogged down in the process of finding charities & dishing out money – but rather focus on where they can MOST IMPROVE THE WORLD. Following in the tracks of Warren Buffett’s partnership with Gates which save him building a whole machinery of his own, and Cheryl Cole’s partnership with the Prince’s Trust.

Good giving: all aboard.

*I would say this. It was my idea & me who introduced them!

   

*I would say this. It was my idea…

 

What will Comic Relief let you do on an aeroplane?–>

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Cheryl Cole Foundation: The most important 3 words

Posted on June 12, 2011 by carolinefiennes

It’s off to a great start. But trouble ahead? Here’s what it should do.

In its first year, Cheryl Cole’s Foundation is teaming up with the Prince’s Trust.

Good.

New donors almost always do well to partner with existing donors and existing charities. They get to learn without making mistakes of their own, and to piggy-back on existing infrastructure so get work done at very low cost. And given Ms Cole’s unsurprising focus on disadvantaged young people in Britain’s North-East, the Prince’s Trust will be a great teacher.

Trouble ahead?

Less cheery are hints on the Foundation’s website about plans after the first year. There’s talk of charities being able to “apply” to the Foundation which will post “a short application form to complete and all applicants will be asked to send in their accounts”.

This sounds like bad news because it sounds like gearing up to create a new infrastructure – to seek applications, make charities fill in forms, consider applications, make grants, monitor them….

Why? LOADS of grant-makers already exist and have that infrastructure. Piggy-backing on somebody else’s makes sense for new donors, and it makes sense for any donor.

Ms Cole, here’s what you should do:

Focus on a few areas. Donors get most done when they choose just a few areas in which to operate. So it’s great that in Year One, you have a single focus. I suggest never having more than four areas. Understand the problems you’re trying to solve: which you can only do if they are few in number.

In each area, partner with a donor who’s already there – just piggy-back on their infrastructure. It’ll work well for you in Year One, and it’ll work well for you forever. Less work for you faffing about receiving & reading forms from charities; and you’ll create less work for charities in filling in your forms. Far from leaving you then with no role, it frees you up from the business of sourcing & selecting charities – to crack on with raising funds, and actually helping them. Minimise the wastage you create.

Play to your strengths. All donors do best when they use for charity the skills and resources which are unique to them. For the Prince of Wales, that’s his convening power. For Goldman Sachs, it’s their financial wizardry which they used to create a bond, thought to have saved half a billion lives. For Dragon James Caan, it’s his public reputation for being good at picking winners, which he used to raise loads of money from the public for Pakistan after the earthquake. For you, my dear, it’s your amazing media pull. That gives you two opportunities. First, a great ability to raise funds. People will trust you to put on a good party which they’ll pay to come to, or to endorse a good beauty product, which they’ll pay for. So your auction of your clothes on ASOS.com is a great move. And second, ability to highlight issues in the press. You went with Comic Relief up Kilimanjaro: great coverage for Comic Relief. You got malaria: suddenly everybody knows about malaria. If you decide that you’re interested in female genital mutilation, or low-pay in jobs dominated by women working part-time, the public will hear a lot about that.

Don’t restrict yourself to charities. Charities are one (very good) way of creating change, but they’re only one tool in the box. If you’re serious about creating economic opportunities, you may do well to look at social enterprises, and/or funds which invest in social enterprises. Discriminate between organisations solely on their ability to create change, not on what their tax-code happens to be.

Cheryl: 3 words. Whatever it takes.

How we can get more pop princess’ giving to charity—>

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Promoting giving to charity is like marketing discretionary purchases

Posted on May 24, 2011 by carolinefiennes

Getting more people to give to charity = getting people to change their behaviour. That is, it’s a marketing job. The same as getting you to buy Coke rather than Pepsi, or to buy stilton outside Christmas, to buy a Rolex at all, to join a club, to read a newspaper.

Giving is particularly tough to market because people can survive perfectly well without it. It’s like a discretionary purchase.

What then can we learn from how discretionary purchases are marketed?

First, make it desirable. Giving, and any other discretionary purchase, has to provide some benefit sufficiently substantial that people will part with money despite not needing to. Fun, humour, aspiration, opportunity to look cool, being ‘in the know’, social acceptability, convenience, getting one up, protecting your family, interesting experiences, buying into a dream… Red Bull gives you wings. You can’t beat the feeling. A crown for every achievement. Because I’m worth it. Sch…you know who. For successful living.

If something is desirable enough, people will do it – even if it’s difficult or expensive. The more desirable it is, the more difficulty or expense they’ll tolerate. People camp out overnight to get a new iPad2. Diamonds command huge price despite zero practical value and an indistinguishable cheaper substitute.

Some analyses about increasing giving make a fundamental error in solely addressing barriers. Perhaps removing barriers is necessary but it’s certainly not sufficient. No practical barriers prevent me from robbing my elderly neighbour or eating loads of cake. That’s not why I don’t do them: the reason I don’t do them is because they’re not remotely desirable to me. We also need a desirable carrot.

Actually, maybe barriers don’t matter at all. Coca Cola recently increased sales by over 1000% (yep, you read that right) by making purchases harder. Its vending machine was so high that a person couldn’t use it alone and needed a friend’s help. Social experiences are highly desirable.

Second, people don’t know why they do things or why they don’t or what would make them do things. As Henry Ford knew, punters have no idea what would make them part with money: “If I’d asked them, they’d have said a faster horse.” Focus group mums told cake companies that they wanted baking to take less time, so the companies made cake-mix: which the mums didn’t buy because that felt like cheating. You simply can’t rely on people to understand and report on why they don’t do things.

Third, segment the market. Whereas some of us want complexity, to be mavericks, to change the system, and think of ourselves as global citizens, others value simplicity, conforming, preserving the status quo and see ourselves primarily as citizens of our local community. That is, desirable experiences vary substantially between segments.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be used to powerfully segment people according to the fundamental psychological need most pressing in them. Giving behaviour is consistent within each segment, but varies markedly between the segments: including whether people give, how they give, motivations for giving, interest in volunteering and the causes they select [evidenced in regular surveys comprising over 1000 questions with more than 8000 people, replicated internationally].

Philanthro-wonks beware: we are concentrated in one segment so need to learn to engage better people dissimilar from ourselves.

Also beware because few philanthro-wonks have backgrounds in marketing. We tend to be from more analytical backgrounds, so inaccurately assume that people are pretty rational.

How do you give yours?

The way to boost giving is to market it – like any other discretionary purchase. Make people aware at a relevant time, make it desirable in ways that are relevant to a variety of segments, and give people something to say about it to their mates afterwards.

Overpriced champagne, anyone?

How a single word could increase giving—>

 

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Why do charities ignore millions of donors?

Posted on May 8, 2011 by carolinefiennes

Despite my giving £200 to Cancer Research UK through JustGiving when a friend did a
sponsored something, I never heard a bean from Cancer Research UK about it. A year later, I gave £100 to another charity when another friend did a sponsored something. Heard nothing. And last month, I gave to a third charity when a third friend did a sponsored something. Again heard nothing. 

What a dreadful experience.

And what idiotic behaviour by those charities. They act as though they had no interest in me or my money or support. I’ve not given to any of them again, though as it happens, I’m passionate about cancer and would have given loads more since then if only they’d asked.

Maybe JustGiving is deterring half the nation’s donors

Nearly half of donors in the UK give through the sponsorship website JustGiving*. I wonder whether they all have as thankless and uninspiring an experience as I did.

Charities claim to be terribly keen to get new donors, and know that recruiting new donors costs five times as much as retaining existing donors. Given the chatter in Charity Land about increasing giving and recruiting new donors, charities should surely be focusing hard on sponsorship because it’s such a good entry point – sponsoring a friend is very natural and very popular. Half the nation doesn’t give at all, and charities need to do much better than this to encourage them to start.

What should happen

“I’m so glad I did that. I’m really going to make sure that I do it again” is how charities should leave donors feeling. So at the very least, charities need to:

  • Thank donors for the donation
  • Give some indication of what they can do with that amount of money (“Your £200 will enable us to answer 57 calls to our helpline from people concerned about cancer”, or somesuch)
  • Offer to stay in touch in future, preferably with inspiring good news stories about what they’re achieving

It would be clever of them also to tell me about the number of other people who also give to that charity:  social norming is strong and I want to feel that I‘m part of some big club. They should have their letter written or ghosted by some celebrity or somebody whom the charity’s helped, so the donor feels a personal connection (“I was so worried when my dad got cancer last year. He was cured of it, and I’m so grateful to people like you who’ve given to support Cancer Research UK’s work who found how to cure him. Together we can beat this…” or something).

Does JustGiving make this hard?

Maybe it’s difficult for charities to contact donors through JustGiving. I don’t know: perhaps it only lets charities ‘see’ the marathon runners (or whatever) but not the friends who sponsor them. In which case, charities need to better arm their marathon runners to pass on thanks to their donors.

Have you had similar or better experiences with sponsorship?

I’m very interested in whether my three dismal experiences are typical and there’s a systemic problem, or whether the sponsorship experience is generally better.

When you’ve sponsored people, have you heard from the charities? Nicely? Did it encourage you to give again?

________________________

*JustGiving claims to have channelled donations from 13 million people. NCVO/CAF think that 28 million adults give in a typical month.

Sources: http://www.justgiving.com/about-us/press/latest-news/facts-and-figures, http://www.cafonline.org/pdf/UK%20Giving%202010_101210.pdf

Chatter about increasing giving: The Cabinet Office’s Green Paper, The Philanthropy Review, The Giving Pledge etc etc.

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Designer brands drive charitable giving

Posted on April 8, 2011 by carolinefiennes

Wearing designer logos virtually doubles donations

According to a study reported by The Economist, all you have to do to increase donations is to dress well! A team of volunteers knocking on doors solicited donations raised nearly twice as much when wearing designer gear as when they weren’t (38 EUR cents against
19).

This is particularly interesting because most people who work for charities (and are doing the asking) are not people interested in brands. They’re a different value mode : brand-conscious people tend to be outer-directed people, whereas most people in charities are inner-directed. To increase giving, people in charities need to become better at relating to people quite different from themselves.

Other ways to engage more people to give —>

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Who gives to charity, why, who doesn’t, why not & what to do about it

Posted on April 6, 2011 by carolinefiennes

A segmentation based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is helpful in showing who gives, who doesn’t, and how to get more people giving more substantially and more often. This paper describes the segmentation, gives the data about giving behaviour and recommendations of increasing giving: Aha – Driving Giving, April 2011.

The segmentation defines three groups of people according to the fundamental psychological need or ‘value’ which is most pressing in them. Giving behaviour is consistent within each segment, but varies markedly between the segments.

Who gives, who doesn’t and why not

Donors are most likely to be ‘inner directed’ people: society’s scouts who are interested in ethics, ‘issues’, analysis and complexity.

Least likely to give are ‘sustenance driven’ people: socially conservative, people concerned about belonging, tradition, drawn to authority.

Furthermore, it seems that all the inner directed people involved in charities may be detering the other two groups – outer directed people and sustenance driven people – from getting involved.

The segments choose very different causes. Sustenance driven are prefer institutions such as hospitals and ex-service personnel; outer directed people choose ‘people’ causes, eg, children, deaf /blind, training organisations; and inner directed people are drawn to the environment, heritage, culture and international development.

To increase giving

Giving has been promoted and dominated by one segment: to grow it, we need fresh approaches:

1. Reach out to each segment. Fish where the fish are: they go to different places, read different magazines, join different groups.

2. Make it desirable. Make giving more talkable, give people something to say on their Facebook status, make it more fun, more socialable – giving is often a totally silent activity – show people what their donation can achieve, make giving socially normal, avoid it feeling like a loss or a luxury.

3. Make it easy. Talking about the complexity of measuring results, for example, is great for inner directed people but probably scares others away.

Do inner directed people dominate the ‘philanthropy industry’?

We’re testing a hypothesis that they do. Find out your segment here, and then post your answer (indicated if you’d like to remain anonymous). The tally is here.

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