Where’s the emotion in your fundraising offer?

You can have all the facts that support your fundraising offer lined up like an army on the march, but you’ll hardly motivate anyone to give until you reach their hearts.

Blame biology.

We human beings make virtually all our decisions with our emotions. Then we circle back with our rational minds to either justify the decision or talk ourselves out of it. It’s the way our brains work.

Yes, you too.

You can watch it happen on an MRI (assuming you’re a well equipped brain research scientist). When someone is making a decision, the right side of the brain — the non-rational side — fires up and goes to work. It’s basically examining which choice will feel better — create more happiness, more pleasure, more respect from others. When it has decided, the right side settles down and the left side lights up. It’s seeking rationalizations.

If you ignore this fundamental truth about human psychology, your fundraising will always be in trouble.

If you don’t believe me, try this thought experiment: One of the following things would galvanize you to quicker and more decisive action. Which one?

1. A toddler running toward a busy street.
   
2. A white-paper about childhood traffic injuries and fatalities.
   

It should be the white-paper. That’s about thousands of children — not just one. And it gives you context and researched solutions. You’ll know a lot more about the issue after reading the white-paper than you would after seeing a child wobble toward traffic. Shouldn’t that be enough stir you to action?

Of course not. You’d have to be a very strange person to be more compelled by a white-paper on traffic safety than a child in danger. That sickening, tight feeling in your torso, that rushing sound in your ears while she veers closer to the heedless cars: It’s an emotional, hormonal storm, with no room for rational calculation. In terms of human response, it’s the real thing.

Yet most nonprofits do “white-paper fundraising” — talking to their donors’ left brains. It’s like going to the DMV to get a really excellent steak dinner. Not gonna happen!

There’s often a breakdown between nonprofit professionals and the donors who support them: The professionals have moved beyond the toddler-running-toward-the-street phase of their connection with the cause. They’re well into their white-paper phase.

They are much more impressed by the scope, depth, and clarity of research than by the immediacy of the real thing. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s a normal progression. Their mistake is assuming everyone else is — or should be — in the same place they are.

An e-mail that dramatically and emotionally describes a three-year-old getting hit by a car just seems cheap and manipulative to them. Not a complete picture of a complex issue.

But for donors, the only thing the bare facts do is make the issue harder to understand—and harder to care about.

Of course, when you’re raising funds you seldom have a real toddler or actual traffic to stir donors to action. You have the same materials as a white-paper: words, pictures, or sounds. You have to make the best of it. The words, sounds, or pictures you use have to be as close to the reality as possible.

Excerpted from The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving by Jeff Brooks

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