Can’t Figure Out How to Get Your Donors Involved? Try Videogames!

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Pastor Foley

So if you ask people to volunteer in your cause before you ask them to give to your cause, you’ll double your donation dollars.

But what if your cause is helping the people of Argentina and you’re trying to reach people in the United States?

Solution: Try videogames.

Check out this 20 minute TED masterpiece by Jane McGonigal entitled Gaming Can Make A Better World. McGonigal’s bio summarizes her approach:

Jane McGonigal asks: Why doesn’t the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we’re surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. In her work as a game designer, she creates games that use mobile and digital technologies to turn everyday spaces into playing fields, and everyday people into teammates. Her game-world insights can explain — and improve — the way we learn, work, solve problems, and lead our real lives.

In the TED video she describes three games her team has thus far created. My personal favorite:

We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global ExtinctionAwareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team. You’ve got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world.

But in our game, instead of just having five peopleon the dream team, we said everybody is on the dream team, and it’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net. We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google “Superstruct”, and see.

What can you do if your cause is so impoverished that <sniff> it doesn’t yet have a videogame associated with it?

Try Googling the name of your cause coupled with the word “videogame”. I Googled “North Korea videogame”, for example, and discovered a half a dozen titles that immediately began to foster ideas in me about how they could be used to promote one of Seoul USA’s core causes, supporting the underground church of North Korea. You might be equally surprised to discover that a game exists that relates to your cause.

A fair question to ask:

Does videogaming lead to real world involvement with the cause…or does it preclude such involvement by virtually “scratching the itch” to make a difference?

McGonigal contends that if it does the latter–if, in other words, the game is more immersive than reality–then that’s an indictment of the reality into which we invite donors:

Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.

Another solution is to check out Blitz Bazaar, which incentivizes real world involvement through an intriguing game structure–making us “jealous unto good works”, as it were.

Last word to Blitz Bazaar’s Lloyd Nimetz (who, by the way, not only spotted the McGonigal post in the first place but also is applying these concepts to getting people involved in helping Argentina):

What would happen if organizations put more energy and creativity into recruiting people’s time and skill instead of their money?  More concretely, what if civil society and government did a better job of tapping into the power of game-mechanics to drive civic participation?  My proposal:  social leaders should step up and set goals for ourselves.  Community leaders should set operational goals i.e. 10% increase in volunteerism & civic participation, and we should keep clear metrics.  Every university, school, organization, corporation, church, etc. in the nation could be put to the challenge.

How about you join me in making this a two-player game?

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Research: Asking People to Volunteer Before Asking Them To Give Doubles Donation Dollars

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Pastor Foley

You know those conspiracy theories about how technology exists today that would enable cars to run on dishwashing soap but Big Oil and Big Automakers are suppressing its spread?

I have a similar conspiracy theory:

Technology exists today that would double the amount of donations the average nonprofit receives, but Big Fundraising is suppressing its spread.

The suppressed technology?

Voluntarism.

We’ve previously detailed the 2001 Independent Sector study that demonstrated that volunteers give twice as much to nonprofits as non-volunteers.

Twice as much.

Yet you’d be hard pressed today to find a book on fundraising where lesson 1 is, “Get folks to volunteer first. Ask them to give after that.”

So in an effort to bash through Big Fundraising’s suppression of this news and of this practice, consider this 2008 study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation.

(Conspiracy theorists should note that the study had to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Did Big Fundraising manage to keep this out of the nonprofit trade mags?)

The research, conducted by Jennifer Aaker and Wendy Liu, consisted of three lab experiments demonstrating that when test subjects were asked to volunteer for a nonprofit and then only subsequently being asked to give, they gave twice as much money as those asked for a donation right off the bat:

According to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in October 2008, asking supporters for their time, not for their money, is a better way to increase donations. Jumping straight in and soliciting potential donors for funds can, in fact, alienate them––making them less likely to get involved and less likely to actually donate. Asking them to volunteer first, however, can positively shift their willingness to give both time and money.

Question: Why? Aaker and Liu:

The reason, according to Jennifer Aaker of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Wendy Liu of UCLA, coauthors of the study, is that questions regarding time versus money stimulate different mindsets. When people are solicited for their time, they automatically think in terms of emotional meaning and fulfillment: Will volunteering for this charity make me happy? When tapped for money, they start thinking about the far more practical, boring, and sometimes painful matter of “economic utility”: Will making a donation make a dent in my wallet?

“The ‘time first’ approach therefore makes the emotional significance of what you’re asking stand out, which stimulates positive feelings and an increased belief that volunteering would be linked to personal happiness. That emotional mindset ultimately leads to greater giving,” explains Aaker, General Atlantic Partners Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Make sure to click through and read in detail about the three experiments that were conducted that led to the conclusion that connecting people to the “deep mission” of the organization through voluntarism made them “more inspired to be involved in that endeavor in every way”–including financially.

And just in case Big Fundraising blocks your browser window from opening to the whole post, make sure to contemplate the following thought from Aaker with regard to your nonprofit’s own practice:

What’s particularly interesting is that participants who were asked first about their time not only gave the most money of all, but also they donated the most time to the organization. This affirms for the researchers that what motivates people to give dollars when they are asked first for their time is not simply guilt; that is, they are not donating more generously as a way of “buying out” of having to give up precious hours. “If guilt had been operating, then those who were asked for time first may have given more money, but they would have given less time than any of the other groups. In fact, the reverse was true,” says Aaker.

Editor’s note: Thanks to Blitz Bazaar’s Lloyd Nimetz for breaking through Big Fundraising’s barricade to call attention to Aaker and Liu’s research.

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“Marketing Is What Happens When Relationship Fails”

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Pastor Foley

The future of philanthropy belongs to a certain structure of nonprofit, and the shape and goal of that nonprofit structure will forever change the way fundraising is conceived and executed.

It is the most basic of structures:

  • An individual embraces a cause and grows to comprehensive maturity in it
  • The individual gathers around herself a community of practice and trains them to grow to comprehensive maturity in the cause
  • Members of that community of practice gather communities of practice around themselves and train those communities to grow to comprehensive maturity in the cause

Growing to comprehensive maturity in a cause entails learning how to impact that cause both directly and in concert with others seeking to impact the cause. The nonprofit organization is nothing other than everything that occurs after the “and” in the previous sentence, i.e.:

A nonprofit organization is a community of practice acting in concert to impact the cause.

Fundraising, then, is nothing other than the coordinated giving that occurs as a community of practice acts in concert to impact the cause.

Enter Carolyn Hook on her Acronym blog, who was listening to a sermon recently where a pastor opined, “Marketing is what happens when relationship fails”.

That sentiment is eminently sensible in light of this understanding of nonprofits and fundraising. Marketing becomes a (poor) substitute for an individual gathering a community of practice around her as a result of having been a part of a community of practice where she learned to grow to full maturity in a cause that engaged her.

Marketing, in other words, is the price nonprofits pay for having donors instead of cause champions.

Donors are largely inert. They don’t reproduce. Cause champions reproduce by nature because they are taught that such reproduction is essential to achieving that to which the cause aspires.

Carolyn sharpens the question up for us nicely:

How can we form and multiply relationships that matter and inspire members instead of relationships that have a goal of developing and maintaining a membership base in order to generate profit for our organizations?

Starting point:

  1. Read our recent three-part series about sustainable fundraising, starting here.
  2. Thank and disband your donor file. They’re a luxury that will distract you wholesale from creating a community of practice.
  3. Gather around yourself a community of practice whom you train to be as mature in the cause as yourself. (You might find some candidates in that donor file you just disbanded under point 2.)
  4. Train them to gather around themselves a community of practice whom they train to be as mature in the cause as you enabled them to be.
  5. Embrace the reality that your nonprofit is nothing more or other than the vehicle for the shared action of the communities of practice you’ve initiated.

Or, as David Armano advocates in HBR, Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire A Community Manager.

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