Future Fundraising Now

Why donors respond to stories

Fundraising is a form of "elder marketing." Get your mind around that fact, and you'll do well.

One of the things worth remembering about older people is that they think a little differently. Their brains are different from the brains of younger folks in a number of important ways. One of those differences is the way they process emotional and rational information.

Here's how the Engage:Boomers blog put it at Make It Experiential:

Resistance to emotionally neutral information (mainly processed in the left hemisphere of the brain) increases in midlife. Receptivity to emotionally enriched information -- such as stories -- increases in midlife. Storytelling has become an important part of market strategy. Whoever tells the best story and tells it best will most likely win.

That's why stories are so important in fundraising. Stories convey information in an emotionally rich package. Facts don't do that.

Maybe you've looked at a fundraising message and had a reaction like this: It's totally unconvincing! It's just emotional fluff! There's no way people would respond to this!

If you are under age 60, that observation has no value.

Your mom or grandma might say something similar about a very well-developed rational case. That's just cold and empty! Why would I or anybody else pay attention to that?

Their brains and yours just work differently. That's the territory if you're in fundraising. Adjust your thinking to it -- or experience a lot of failure.

Study: Donors worry less than you do

If you want to be good at fundraising, get into the minds of older people.

Here's a study that'll help -- and it just might blow you away. It's from Gallup: Don't Worry, Be 80: Worry and Stress Decline With Age. Here's what they found:

... "worry" is a much more common emotion among young and middle-aged Americans than among seniors. Well over a third (37%) of those in their 40s report having experienced worry "a lot of the day yesterday." This figure drops to about 23% among those in their late 60s and drops further to 15% among those aged 91 and older.

Most of us would guess that age brings more worry: After all, there's more to worry about as you grow older: Health issues, limited income, seeing your friends die.... But apparently these things don't add up to increased worry.

Deeper analysis of the data pretty much rules out lifestyle factors (no children at home, no job, being more religious, being more likely to be female) as explanations for the lack of worrying.

Nope. Older people just worry less. Not because they have less to worry about, but because they think differently. Some combination of wisdom, perspective, and changing brain chemistry gives them a different way of handling the future.

Readers of this blog are overwhelmingly in their 20s to 50s. You're still a worry-wart.

So wrap your mind around this: Imagine your life being exactly the way it is, but you worry about things materially less. That would be a fundamentally different experience of reality. In some ways, it's a deeper and harder to bridge gap than the cultural differences we encounter when we travel.

I don't know what -- if anything -- lack of worry has to do with charitable giving. But I do know that this one issue signals that older people are different from me. (I'm in my peak worrying years.) It's an important reminder that you can't judge fundraising from the way it affects you.

Keep that knowledge in mind, and you'll automatically be one of the best fundraisers around.

Thanks to The Boomer Blog for the tip.

When will the future start?

As far as fundraisers are concerned, the future began January 1, 2006.

I realize the bogus coefficient of that statement is potentially high.  But that date is significant because it's the official beginning of the Boomer Generation.  That's the generation that habitually transforms everything it touches:  Pop culture, politics, family life, business ...

And, now that they're getting older, fundraising.

Every day starting 1/1/06 more than 7,000 Boomers turn 60 in the US. (The phenomenon is similar in all Western countries and exists to a lesser extent throughout the world.)

Beside being the most numerous generation in the US before or since, the Boomers have shown a number of characteristics that matter a lot to us fundraisers:

• They're more cynical.
• They're used to having it their way as consumers.
• They're extremely hands-on.
• They're the first online savvy generation.
• They're wealthier, more ethnically diverse, and will live longer than previous generations.

Fundraising as we know it was designed to work with Boomers' parents and grandparents.  The techniques and approaches we know today may or may not work with Boomers. 

Now the Boomers' parents are still around.  They still dominate the ranks of most donorfiles.  But they're shrinking and the Boomers are growing.

Depending on your cause and the ways you've been acquiring donors, you may have already seen major or little change in what works.  Whether your change is fast or slow, assume change is happening.  Already.

We've had going on four years to figure out the Boomers.  What have we learned?