It's easy to get focused on the size of a problem. Thousands of people are homeless in our community. Hundreds of acres of forest are destroyed every day. Millions of innocent animals are euthanized every year. 24,000 children die from hunger every day.
These things seem to add scope and urgency to our causes.
Thing is, they don't. They make our causes seem less real to most donors.
Seth Godin points this out at More than ten is too many:
Time and again, we're unable to put more urgency or more value on choices that have more impact. We don't donate ten times as much to a charity that's serving 10 times (or even 100 times) more people. We don't prioritize our interest or our urgency based on scale, we do it based on noise.
This is why saying 24,000 children die from hunger every day is bad fundraising. One child dying from hunger is far more tragic to the human mind than is 24,000 every day.
People respond to numbers they can grasp. Not huge numbers.
(See Fundcrushing for more on this topic.)
