0:03  
Hello again, folks. Thanks for enjoying that last session with Lynn Abati Johnson, we are now transitioning into the chaotic beauty of generosity exchange. Let me mute myself on the other screen. There we go. I'm here and myself. So hi, Otis. Hi, Katrina. How are you?

0:27  
Hola, we're great. Glad to be here.

0:30  
Awesome. Well, so thrilled to have you here. I'm gonna get you folks queued up. We're we have a fantastic session. With the team from turnkey for good. I am so excited for this. Otis Fulton Katrina Van Hus are some of my favorite people in the world. If you are trying to get into my head, it's because they're in my head. So that's, that's one of the key things I have. I even have your book like around here. There it is, at this is the last book that that they've done. But I know you're working on some other stuff, folks, dollar dash, like, instrumental in my my career as a fundraiser. And so I had to say, the two of you, we had a lot of conversations where I said, go to this session. So that happened yesterday, I think people are excited. I'm going to hand it off to you, though. I'm going to kind of pop back in at the very end. But otherwise, the floor is yours. I could put your slide deck on. And you could start popping through.

1:31  
All right, excellent. Thank you, Tim. And you are one of our favorite people to. And we could have just ended the session after you, you know, talk so nicely about us, I'd be fine with that. But we are going to talk about identity and community today. So if you want to go forward to the agenda, slide, Otis, thank you. That's who we are plenty of us. So we're going to talk about these things. Today, we're going to start with the person, we'll move into why resort supporters respond, which is a little bit counterintuitive. We'll talk about how to message to get them to respond the role of recognition and gifts. I consider this two part thing, the person at the top and then the situation is the next most important thing. And the situation is defined by the community we create versus events. And then we're going to give you an example of some folks who are doing it really, really well. Fun. So I just want to hit the next slide. So you know, when you're in a conversation, you got to ask why am I here. And the reason that you're here and that we're here and that we're talking about this is that we have a problem. And the problem is acquisition costs a lot, both in terms of money and energy and time. And we don't keep for many of the people that we acquire. So we're just the the worst kind of leaky bucket. And how do we fix that. And we're going to offer a solution to you for that problem today, Otis,

2:58  
and I should just mention that Katrina and I will be interrupting each other talking over each other. It's perfectly normal. We're a married couple. So we do this in all aspects of our life and has done a lot of webinars. So, you know, I'm a social psychologist, and I can tell you, what's that look of it happen. It's not philanthropic psychology is thrilling, philanthropic psychology. But

3:20  
I think we should keep it. This is

3:23  
unexpected, when it went up to this platform. You know, the work of philanthropic psychology has been going on for about the last 20 years. It's headquartered in the UK at the Institute for Sustainable philanthropy. And basically, this work focuses on what makes supporters satisfied in their relationships with nonprofits. And what they found is that there's really, and they're all going to be this way grant, that, you know, if I could sum up their work, I put it this way that you know, it's a fundamental shift. Donors aren't giving to you, or fundraising for you. They're giving and fundraising through you to make something that they care about happen. And this has big implications for how you communicate with your supporters. For one thing, so let's talk about what motivates your supporters to respond. You know, in the past, we've really thought that it's pretty much how we make them feel. It's the emotion of the appeal. And we know that that's, that's true, especially for first time donors. People will often often make an kind of an emotional impulse buy, and they'll donate based on some emotional reaction to your mission that they have. But what we know from the work of philanthropic psychology is that's not what sustains them over time. You You know, emotion is fleeting, you it doesn't really sustain what sustains is this. Two things the supporters goals, their identity, and the perceived impact that they have By there, as far as their relationship goes with you, you know, what are they making happen in the world through donating to you or supporting your organization and so forth. And I'll get into identity kind of in detail in in a few few minutes. But you know it, it gets into what I love this example. This is from one of my favorite bloggers, Jeff Brooks, from Future Fundraising. Now, he calls this the Batman model. This is how supporters interact with the scheming nonprofits interact with their supporters. And it's not a model that you want to emulate. And here's why. In the Batman model, the nonprofit's Batman, the supporter is wrong. So Batman drives the Batmobile. You know, he throws the battering ram is just kind of the supporter he's, he's he's Batman's helper, it puts Batman in center stage. So in communications with their supporters, Batman model organizations, you hear a lot about like this, please donate so we can help us help the children support this great work. So it puts the donor the supporter, clearly in the background. It's It's again, Batman, that center stage. And I call how most nonprofits talk, you whatever we did this, we did that. We were amazing. Oh, and by the way, thank you. And, again, through the work of philanthropic psychology, their research, we know now that this raises much more money, what I call you centric language. Because of you, all these amazing things will happen without you, they won't. So you know, my three magic words are because of you. And you know, I write a lot of copy for our clients and so forth. And I sprinkled because of you throughout the copy, it's what's the support, it makes happen, you know,

6:59  
you know, in the philanthropic psychology model, they're not your supporter, you're just one of the charities that they support. So it really is, again, a fundamental shift in how we think about the relationship between the organization and the supporters. I thought that this was really nice. I know this is terribly hard to read even on a computer screen. But this was a this was a study that was done back in 2017. But I think it's still tear, still terribly relevant. Now. This was called the National usage and awareness study, I'll just talk you through this. What they did was they took a look at 99,000 People who had supported a nonprofit in a fairly significant way. For multiple years, they had donated to one nonprofit, between 250 and $2,500. But they had lapsed for at least 12 months, they had stopped donating to this particular organization. And they asked them well, why did you stop donating. And I know it's impossible to read from this again, I'm sorry, I'm how these these these slides translated. But the number one reason that they stopped donating were that they weren't thanked for a previous gift. The second biggest reason was they weren't told how the funds were used. The very last reason that they stopped donating was what they called solicitation overreach, they felt like they had been asked to donate too many times. Now how many times that we sat around with our, with our group and so forth, and we're reluctant to ask people for their support and so forth. You know, I hear that all the time. You know, we can't ask people too many times, they'll get burned out and so forth. But it's really that they weren't thanked, they weren't asked for for another donation. You know, that's kind of the blocking and tackling of communications with with the supporters. And that's what most nonprofits just don't do terribly well. And that gets into recognition. And, you know, we know people want to be recognized, of the billions of dollars that are donated to charity every year, less than 25%, depending on the channel are made anonymously. So you know, people want other people to see that they're contributing their their community. Psychologists call this image motivation, you know, we're all motivated to have other people think that we're someone who contributes to the general good, and so forth. So recognition is a huge part of this. And Katrina is going to tell us about how gifts play into this whole scenario.

9:46  
Let me preface this with people are crazy beast. What they do doesn't make sense a lot and this was my first experience that I'll reach out to you. That impacted me in my business life greatly when I figured Oh, wow, this is not what I expected. I started my company 33 years ago, and I ran it primarily as a recognition system company for many, many years serving nonprofits, my first big client and was the American Cancer Society Relay for Life. And I started with them back when Virginia was a state program that many of you know that's a long time ago, 33 years to be exact, and went with them all the way to their peak at 435 million a year. And in that entire time, I served them with recognition programs. And when online fundraising started, suddenly, this new form of business intelligence was available and, and we were able to match their behavior in response to gifts to their fundraising, and retention behavior. And what we found was really counterintuitive. And the beginning, we only did research within a one year span. And within a one year span, it looked like people reacted very positively to gifts. And the better the gift, the more they would fundraise. That's what it looked like in the data. And if they redeemed a gift, you know, even better, we thought that was true. But then we started to notice something like the people who redeemed gifts were behaving oddly in the second year. And if they redeemed something like a grill, or an iPad, or something like that, their behavior was even more marked. It was they weren't coming back, they were fundraising less, something was happening. And so as we dug down into why that was, what we found is that we were actually creating a negative situation with gifts that were too valuable. And people were translating into a quid pro quo. So that was the beginning of us really looking at gifts and evaluating like, is this a positive thing. And here's one thing I learned too, is that it's really hard to counsel your clients against buying high dollar valuable gifts in large quantities, and run a recognition business and make money like those two things, they just don't go together. And so right before COVID, we actually made the transition away from recognition systems that use product, even though there was a place for product. And we coach and counsel our clients now to use recognition delivered in different ways. So it was pretty tricky. And, you know, a lot of this was drawn from data. At that time, when when we started to see this negative thing I didn't notice, you know, I had to go find myself a social psychologist, and then I had to just go and marry it, because we just kept talking about it. And then we got to some awesome nerd stuff that he is gonna help you understand about gifts.

12:40  
Yeah, literally, I met Katrina on a blind date and match.com. And that was our very first conversation that we ever had. And she explained this to me this strange finding. And I said, Well, you know why that happens, don't you? And she said, No, I have no idea. And then I turned into Ron, burgundy and Anchorman. And I said, Well, I have many leather bound books on this topic. And so the rest is history. So yeah, let's talk about some awesome nerd stuff. So you know, why? Why is this Why Why does this happen? Why? Why when you give people more stuff, that to reward them for things that they want to do, why did they do it less, basically, and this was the topic of a study by legendary social psychologist who's still living I've heard him speak a couple of times, Edward DC. He's taught us more about motivation than any other psychologist. And back in 1999, he did a meta analysis. If you remember your statistics, I think he took 128 Different studies and did an analysis of them as if they were one study, and what he wanted to look at these studies all looked at what happened when he gave extrinsic rewards to people who were intrinsically motivated. So you're rewarding people for things that they want to do anyway, like support a nonprofit organization, for instance. And it's a pretty complicated study. But what I did was I kind of boiled it down to the results to, you know, what's important for us as nonprofit professionals, in terms of gifts and rewards and so forth. So you can see this the red means that your people were less likely to repeat the behavior green as they're more likely Black is neutral. So all rewards overall were neutral. And what they fled, he found was that what was motivating, made people more likely to continue to come back. Worth were thank yous just receiving thank yous and telling them what the impact of their behavior was. Now, what was demotivating were tangible gifts, okay, as Katrina was talking about giving them the expensive, cooler and so forth, giving them gift cards, giving them trips and so on. And it kind of broke down into two different types of tangible goods. expected gifts were the worst. You know, psychologists call these behavior contingent rewards, like, raise $1,000 for the American Cancer Society, and you'll get this this,

15:16  
you know, I spent 20 years doing that it really every time you say it, it just makes me.

15:22  
You know, now, what was neutral? were unexpected gifts. And you know, even though these were neutral, I am a big proponent of unexpected gifts. And I think that they're well worth doing some testing. We have we have a client, a Spinal Bifida Association, in spring of 2020. You know, COVID was, you know, the COVID thing was pretty new. And I don't know if you remember, hand sanitizer was tough to get. We can m&m big fun hand sanitizer. So one thing that we suggested them was, why don't you just take your 500, top 1000 supporters and so forth, and just just send them a have a little label made on a hand sanitizer to be hand sanitizer, this is from your friends, stay safe from the Americans spawnable Association, rather, and just send it to them Don't Don't tell them it's coming, I'll tell you, it was the most wonderful thing, you know, it just kind of getting an unexpected gift is just such such a nice thing, you know, it just has a completely different vibe, then. Then I raise $1,000. So I got this cooler, totally, totally different. It's the kind of thing that you might do for a friend or a sister. And that's exactly where you want to position psychologically, you're supportive. So anyway, I don't want to go on about this. But I'm a big proponent of unexpected gifts. I'm very down on expected gifts.

16:53  
And not to belabor the point. But you know, there is a place for gifts when we stopped doing recognition systems in the form of product, I offloaded my clients that I was serving two, three of my friendly fire competitors. And but when they learned how we were coaching our clients, they're like, Thanks for nothing Katrina, because the answer is less is more. You know, when we give our clients a gift, it needs to be of a very low value. So that it is Otis what is the phrase that you use,

17:26  
it needs to be an insufficient justification, if I can just take a moment to explain that. You know, what, what you're really trying to get away from is people unconsciously feeling that they've been compensated for some behavior. You know, there's a very interesting study came out about six or seven years ago that talks about lawyers, and, you know, lawyers billed by the hour. And what they found was that lawyers unconsciously evaluate, say, an a, in an outing, like taking their kids to a baseball game, in terms of dollars and cents. And so that's what we all tend to do unconsciously as well. So when you give somebody a $50 target card, as a thank you for doing something all weekend to support your event, and so forth, there's this unconscious process that says, gee, this was like, I was paid $4 an hour, because I work 16 hours. Whereas, you know, nope, nobody comes out to your event, and parks cars all weekend for a $2 T shirt, the $2 T shirt of insufficient justification to set up this kind of an unconscious thing that maybe I'm getting paid for this behavior. So yes, it should be insufficient justification, less is more these the any gifts should be a very, very low value.

18:52  
So in the old days, when we were doing a lot of recognition programs with product, our budget that we would recommend to a client was you know, at the low levels to 5500 1025, I did spend about 5% of the amount raised on the gift. And then when we switched, we it became very different, you know, $10,000 fundraiser, a lapel pin, that's going to do it. The method in which it's presented is important, but that's the sort of thing we recommend if you'll hit the next slide notice. And if you do use product in any way, hoodies, lapel pins, iPads, we don't recommend anything with a brand that is well known. Always branded with your logo, no matter what always have modest value, and otherwise unavailable. So some of the things my clients like to do in the past would be like getting a yeti mug and putting their logo on it. Yeah, that's really nice. I enjoy getting one but Otis does that set me up psychologically, to be in a quid pro quo. Oh,

20:01  
absolutely. And again, you know, it's a very, it can be difficult for some people to understand. But these things happen unconsciously.

20:09  
So, but there is a place for products. And let's take the $10,000 fundraiser. And as an example, I just said, you can go the next slide. Let's say you're using a lapel pin, and you want to give it to your $10,000 fundraiser, when you do it, do it in front of people bring them on stage. So the coaching that we give our clients now is to put people in a situation that really reinforces their identity. So shipping someone a grill, because they raised $10,000, is very different from asking them to be at a board meeting, or an annual meeting, and calling them on stage and saying, Thank you, here you go. Stage time itself. Microphone time is one of the biggest parts of recognition and one of the most powerful parts, I'll give you a story. I was product vendor and Relay for Life was having a regional meeting in my area. And they asked me if I would run a product store at that meeting. And I said, Fine, you know, it's close to me, I don't mind doing it. And so I did that, and I'm in the store and running it. This is like 20 years ago. And it just so happened that they were having an award ceremony on in the, at the meeting. And it also so happened that I was the only representative who had participated in my local Relay for Life. At that meeting, they came and they brought me out of the store, we locked it up. And they put me in line to receive recognition as one of the representatives of that Relay for Life in Mechanicsville, Virginia. And suddenly, within two years, I was chairing the event, it was that powerful to pull me on stage unexpectedly and just say thanks. It was amazing. So we coach our clients with recognition, away from a lot of product and towards situations like that. We create situations when we script staff people with the appropriate way to talk to volunteers, we tell staff people, for example, one of the rules for living at Relay for Life when I was much younger was you know, staff, people don't ever hold the microphone, only a volunteer gets to hold a microphone. And that's really powerful. The other way that you give recognition is to give people jobs, responsibility, let them make meaningful decisions. That's so much better recognition than a jacket. Oh, and I forgot one thing. Yeah. When we recognize people with our words, we talk about who they are not what they do. So for example, when we call someone on stage, because they raise $10,000, we're going to give them a very low value lapel pin, we're not going to say you're so great, you raise $10,000, we're going to say you were the kind of caring, nurturing, thoughtful person who would do this kind of thing. So it's about their identity and building that versus simply focusing on the behavior that they exhibited at the moment.

23:07  
Oh, yeah. And you know, that that's so important because behavior varies, you know, this year I raised $500. But your identity sustains and you know, I'm always you always want to talk to me is about being a kind, compassionate person. I'm the kind of kind compassionate person that supports the Richmond society, Prevention of Cruelty animals, for example. So you know, reinforced identity over and over and I'm, you know, I'm a identity psychologists social psychologist, I study identity. So to me, everything hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I want to give you an idea of you know, how powerful this idea of identity really can be. And I want to talk this is the work of Dr. Kikicootmarido, who I know I didn't pronounce her name, right. She's Greek. She's a donor voice. I think donor voice does. Some of the best work in the world in terms of translating psychology into the nonprofit world. This was a study that she did in 2018 with Ducks Unlimited. And I can't read this on screen but I have it here on paper. So let me find it. What they did was this was the Facebook ad. And for half of the folks they offered a jacket now. I grew up in Iowa. My one of my families are hunters. I was not I was the odd kid. You know, you know who I was but the Ducks Unlimited. Jack is very familiar to my family, you know, they were all hanging on in mudrooms, and so forth. So for half of this study, again, this was on Facebook. They did a traditional kind of an outreach to people to renew or to join Ducks Unlimited, so they said back by popular demand, join or renew or extend your Ducks Unlimited membership today. and receive the the quilted jacket as our gift to you. So the call to action was joined Ducks Unlimited, get the Ducks Unlimited quilted jacket as our gift now that got a pretty good conversion rate. So I got 1.33% of people that saw this ad converted. And then they for another half of their study, they didn't do the jacket, they went for an identity appeal. And so they said this as a conservationist, you know how important the wetlands are to flood control clean water, and the wildlife who call them home, help out, help our shared ecosystem and be a supporter of one of the world's largest wetland conservation organizations. And then their call to action was your support preserves the wetlands ecosystem. No jacket here, don't have to ship a jacket, make a jacket. Keep a jacket. And the conversion rate for this was nearly identical. So you know, here you've got product versus non product, it's kind of a transaction versus identity. And I can tell you, I don't have any data on this. But the people that converted with the identity appeal, were the people that are going to remain with your organization, if they're handled appropriately.

26:23  
So Otis, actually you don't know about this. But I have another story from another client, who did an acquisition campaign using just a decal, which I would not have thought would inspire negative relationship in any way. They did a sustainer acquisition campaign with just a decal as the offer in the same manner that the Coulter jacket was offered here. And what they found is that it performed brilliantly, but they canceled on month to enlarge majority.

26:55  
Yeah, not surprising. Not surprising. Okay. So, you know, as I mentioned, I'm going to talk a little bit more about identity getting get into the why, why this is really important. I'm a social psychologist, I study identity, because we know that people's identity greatly influences their behavior. You know, specifically, I study their relationship, identity recognition and fundraise. And that was what my doctoral dissertation dealt with. And people have many aspects of their identities. So, me, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a fundraising professional, I'm an animal rights advocate. And at any given time, parts of our identity are more salient, as psychologists say, than others, you know, they're the, they're more to the fore. So my, my fundraising professional identity is in the front front, right now. I'm also a white guy who played basketball in the night in the ACC in 1970. So you know, that part of my identity, not so salient, but maybe if I raise funds for the UVA Athletic Association, like some of my former teammates, that would be more a more important part of part of my identity, and it'd be more salient. And research tells us that, you know, most people have eight or nine identities that they, you know, think are salient or think of are important to them. So, you know, we have eight or nine ways to connect with them. There's a great book that came out last month, called the Chaos Machine, it's great, and yet, it's depressing. It's about the history of social media. And one of the quotes from the book is, the single most powerful force on social media is identity. And the depressing part of it is how it describes how Facebook, for example, found that the best way to maximize in the engagement or the attention of their, their users, you know, that just to keep them on the site, as long as possible in order to sell ads is to create community identities, and then encourage these identity conflicts between the groups, liberals, conservatives, gay, straight, vaxxers, anti vaxxers, masters, anti maskers, whatever it is. So you know what, what Katrina and I talk a lot about is putting the power of identity to get to good use. In our case, we you know, we're manipulating and pulling and fostering the connections to a community and identity as well. But But, but you know, we don't want to pit anybody against another group.

29:28  
I just found the comments. This is pretty cool. And we have a question. I think that is related to this. From Tammy. She asked, there's a debate in the sector about the merits of donor centricity versus community centricity. What are the speaker's views on these two schools of thought?

29:46  
I would love to comment on that, you know, that is a really interesting point and a question and, you know, the, the donor centric versus the community centric gets into this. And it's a very good argument that you Yes, you're part of our of the nonprofits community. And so, you know, we want to talk about us doing these things in partnership, feeding, feeding, the feeding the hungry, in partnership and so forth. You know, I have to say, I haven't seen the data that supports that that is a more powerful motivator than the donor centric approach. But, um, you know, I think it's something that's definitely worth, you know, worth keeping in mind, you know, I, the data, very clearly shows that this you centric, that, that the organization is a is a tool that the that the supporter uses to make something that they care about happen. That that's, that's really the powerful motivator. But I think that there's, you know, listen, the great thing is that we're having a thoughtful discussion about this, instead of just telling the Oregon, the supporters how great our organizations are, because we know that when we just talk about ourselves, that that's, that's not a successful recipe.

31:08  
So to someone to contribute two things. Number one, this is anecdotal. It's not really data. But in the way back when I was doing product, we occasionally would design a program focused at teams of people versus individuals, or even events versus individuals. And they didn't work, you know, they didn't work as well as the individual stuff. And so I came to the idea that, you know, even a flock of swallows, even though it looks like one unit, it's really individual swallows that are making that design in the air. And I wondered, Otis, if you could talk a little bit about, and I think it might be related, you know, we talk about the savanna and how we, gosh, I'm trying to remember, it's about why you would throw yourself on a grenade for the group, that sort of evolutionary pressure, and how that makes the individual look like it's part of a group. Do you remember that I do this to him all the time, people I asked him

32:13  
to put in a completely different evolutionary psychology, what she's talking about is this, you know, we all grew up, all of us evolved from these groups of small people, around 15 or so these little communities. And, you know, our, our antenna for recognition, became very finely tuned, you know, our survival as as an individual were was based on how the group treated us, you know, when there were resources to be shared, the group's share them with us and so forth. So our DNA is coded to be very helpful to our to our community. And so I'm not sure exactly where you need to want to.

32:56  
Well, that, you know, there's this argument that some things look like evolutionary pressure could not have created them, because people will do things for the good of the group instead of for the good of themselves. But, in fact, you know, group survival is individual survival. So I think that muddies the water, about the way we behave, and could muddy the water on the community versus donor centric conversation as well. This is gonna require way more wine and discussion, which will take care of and get back to you guys. Okay,

33:26  
this is a classic conversation in our home. I'm just sorry, it was the share publicly. But yes, you know, it, you know, to Katrina's point, in general, people assume that people are selfish, when actually people are very willing to contribute to others. You know, there's there's some fascinating research that came out just this last year that the basically talked about. It was a study with leukemia, lymphoma society, their race, their light, light the night and what they did was they asked folks, you know, they had a goal of, say, $1,000, and they asked them, How many people do you think that you're going to have to ask in order to raise $1,000? Well, they gave their estimate. And then at the end of the day, what happened was, they only had to ask half as many people as they thought that they were going to have to ask. So so people underestimate their influence over others, tremendously. So you know, people people assume that people are much more selfish than they are. And they also think that they have much less influence over others than they think that they actually do.

34:34  
Notice, since we're off the beaten path already, I'm going to continue along, said pap, and we can't see the q&a. So thank you, Nancy, for putting that in the comments. I can read your question there. So this is a question from Aranda, and I'll confess I don't think I quite understand it. Miranda says, This feels slightly challenging to me because I am in behavioral health and don't want to diminish the hard work that participants of our mission and are accomplishing. I don't want to diminish the hard work that participants of our mission are accomplishing meaning those served I think it wasn't because of the donor that a person was able to overcome sud. How do we accomplish this without a diminishing the hard work of the people serve by the mission? So she's asking about the the, the affected population in and that being donor centric, may not raise them up enough. From my point of view, I think those are different sets of communications. Indeed, there can be crossover, the people served can definitely be part of the donor base. But I'm not sure we could accomplish both things in one communication. Oh, just did you understand the question?

35:50  
Yeah, I think I interpreted the same way. And yes, you know, you want to stratify your list? very thoughtfully, in all kinds of ways. You know, I mentioned that the emotion of an appeal is very good for for first time donors. So, you know, but for recurring donors, you don't want to trigger that emotion anymore. Because, you know, then people who have been with you for a while will say, gosh, you know, you're still talking about all these hungry kids. I've been, I've been supporting you for a year and nothing's changing. So you know, you have to you have to, you have to report wins to those folks. So yeah, you want to you want to communicate with with different groups very, very differently.

36:34  
I think that's really great question, though. I appreciate that.

36:37  
Okay, and we're gonna move on Katrina, thank you very much. Thank you very much. So people like us do things like this seven of my favorite words strung together? Well, I'm a huge fan of Seth Godin, the marketing guru, you know, if you can ask people who support you, why they do and they say people like us, people like me, we just do things like this. That means that supporting your organization is a part of their identity. And those are the people that are on board for the long haul, because they see themselves in a war against cancer or, you know, whatever it is an evangelist for XYZ, your your mission, so of course, they're gonna raise money, they're going to donate, you're gonna volunteer, they're gonna bring bring friends to the to your, to your events, and so forth, you know, because it's part of their identity. And again, I wanted to show you another example of how sensitive people are to their identity being triggered. This was another one of Kiki Kook Marino's studies on Facebook, this is for faith, make a wish. And she sent this only to health care professionals, okay, nurses, doctors, you know, whatever people that work in hospitals, and it was for Make a wish, and the the kind of the control center half of them was this when you donate and help her and, and help grant a wish, you help her fight her illness, and grant a child's wish today, it was a call to action. And then for the other half of the group, she sent a an identity based appeal. And it just started off as a medical professional, you know, the heartache of a child diagnosed with a critical illness. And then again, when you donate and help grant a wish, you help her fight her illness. Okay. So you know, even though it was identity, it was it was very general, just as a medical professional, but what happened was that just calling out tagging them as medical professionals, resulted in a 41% increase in the amount of people that responded. So people are very sensitive to their identity. And they respond very, very strongly to their identity, even when it's in this general kind of a sense that it is that it was here. So Katrina, let's wrap this together and tell us what the problem is with events.

38:50  
All right, I am going to do that. But I gotta say, you know, like, if we were in a hotel, and we were getting these kind of questions, we'd be like, Alright, everybody to the bar, because we can't stop talking. Because Elon, that's a really great comment that you put in, and I appreciate it. So the problem with events, you know, I started my career serving events series, like Relay for Life and March of Dimes, walk for babies, things like that. And the problem with events is that it's just not enough. You know, we were going to talk about the vegans here, Otis? Yes, yes. That's later. So the problem with events is that if events or if your constituents were a family, the event wouldn't be like the family reunion. It's when we come together once a year, but the rest of the year, we're still a family. But if we don't talk to each other, and we don't mail each other, and we don't see each other all year long, we just show up at the reunion. You know, I don't know about you, but I forget who's dead and who's not. When I go to my family reunions, I'm like, oh my god, I thought you were dead. So yeah, and that's kind of how it is with an event. It's just not enough to become part of the community. And it's not in Have to solidify your identity, you know that attribute of your identity. So if we change the frame and we look at events not as a thing in and of itself, we and we get rid of the phrase event participant, and instead use constituent who participates in an event, then we have them framed more correctly, an event is just a moment in time for the community. It's just the time when we get together, it's the family reunion. But we still talk to each other, we have Sunday dinners, we do other things that we might call board meetings, or you might call Speaker Series, or you might call them a lot of things, but we are interacting all the time. So one of the things that we work hard to do is to put these ideas into a frame that you can use. So the first question is what is a community and we've all defined it with terms of art. In the past, I've done it, you know, communities, people who love each other, or a community is the people on my email list. And neither of those things are correct. The community is it really has two attributes. The first one is a community shares an interest, whether that interest is I want to find a cure for Alzheimer's, or I want to feed hungry children. And the second part of community is this. And this is where we miss a community has a way to communicate with each other. We make lots of ways for communities to be talked to by us, we sometimes feel really smart, because we give them a way to talk back to us. But we invest almost nothing into helping them talk to each other. The event does that to some degree. But only by happenstance, right? That wasn't really our plan to let them communicate with each other. And I had even been part of event series where we tried to contain the ability for the community to talk to each other because when they talk to each other, they have ideas and it's like a horse business, nothing that goes and then suddenly, we're not in control. And they want to use the logo and change of color. And they wanted a new event t shirt and all the things that people with ideas want to do. So we think events ultimately will not produce warriors. Because we just don't give them enough opportunity to solidify their identity. Otis?

42:24  
Yeah. So let's talk about identity Marina, this was, if there was one takeaway, forget the thing about evolutionary psychology, by the way, that was not a key takeaway I got led down a path, I didn't want to go. Okay, so here's if I had a son, but here's the key idea, you know, your identity makes you more likely to interact with the community, the people who are like you to some way so because every time you interact with your community, your identity is validated. And that makes you more likely to interact. So it's this virtuous cycle that goes round and round around your identity makes you more likely to interact with those who are like you in some way. And when you do, it strengthens your identity. And it's just big loop, you know, and I called it the I've been talking about this for about a year now. And without a better language for it, I just call this the virtual virtuous loop. That was what I made up. But as I read that book, the cast machine, they were very particular about calling this out, this is exactly what they want to do in order to maximize engagement on their platforms. And they call this the, quote, social validation feedback loop. So you know, what I kind of stumbled onto and saw was something that Mark Zuckerberg and, and those of his ilk, we're very, very carefully manipulating on social media. But we can do this for not to sell ads, but to raise money for missions. Katrina already talked about this a little bit. And so I just want to, you know, just to talk about this identity piece a little bit. You know, we had this dinner party, right before COVID hit, we had about 10 people over. And we found that two of the people I didn't know it, but were vegans. Now, they weren't Joaquin Phoenix and his wife. But when you Google two vegans, this is the picture that came up. So this is what I use in the presentation. But anyway, didn't I do all the cooking of the house, I'd made this in these nice, nice pork tenderloins. And then we sit down on the table and oh, when they serve it, we find that, oh, these two people are vegans. Well, we had a good laugh about it. And we got to chatting about it with him about it. And it just struck us how many ways these vegans had to express this part of their identity. They didn't wear any leather that was a clothes they wore, they they grew their own food, they interacted with other vegans, they were in a co op they they fostered dogs and so forth. You know, all these things in their veganism was a lifestyle. And you know, the problem with events is It doesn't promote a lifestyle. It's like, as Katrina was saying, it's this one shot thing that just doesn't sustain people is as part of their community. So these vegans had all kinds of opportunities to engage with their community in ways that were very meaningful to them, events, really don't give us that opportunity.

45:23  
So what's the formula? You know, what's the math of this thing, and the math of this thing is that events are not enough, it has to be bigger. And what that implies is that we have to break down the silos between ways to engage and those equal revenue channels often, and that's becoming more the norm. But there's still a lot of ownership and elbows out sort of gameplay, about my list my constituents, my participants, categorizing these people as if their primary concern is your particular revenue channel versus the mission. And your channel is just what they're doing today. It's like having a grocery store and only allowing people to shop in one aisle when they're there for food. So, you know, our job is to create more ways and times to engage for our constituents. And we're going to give you one really great example of a program that does that super well. And that is THON. Oh,

46:24  
yeah. Before, it's all about that, let me say, you know, you know, just in general, a community strength, you know, you can measure it by the number of engagement that members have with each other not Not, not, not all, engagement is created equal, and so forth. But, but in general, more engagement is better. And just one thing that I'm aware of last year, the American Cancer Society, set up a Facebook group for each one of their 96 I believe, events around the country. And you know, the average number of engagements, that's posts or responses to posts, not you know, thumbs up likes, but you know, actually people responding 22 per person, you know, that's a lot of engagement. That's a lot of interaction. You know, people want to connect with members of their community. So when we give them these opportunities, they really take advantage of them. Now, what Katrina was talking about was font, their client of ours. This is what what we've been talking about looks like in real life. What is THON? Fun is a dance marathon. It's the most successful student run charity in the world. And it's at Penn State University. And Fund supports the Hershey Cancer Center. And it's raised $190 million since 1972. During COVID, thon raised about 11 and $12 million, the last two years, so they really didn't miss a beat. And I think that this is so so telling about their philosophy. Our year long efforts culminate in a 46 hour dance marathon. So notice, they say it culminates in a dance marathon in the event. If you're on the Penn State campus, you walk around, you'll see more THON logos, more THON swag worn by students than Penn State logos. So for many students, you know, Thawne becomes this lifestyle is that it's like they're vegans. So how do they achieve that? Dream.

48:27  
So they do crazy stuff. They just do crazy stuff. If you look at this is just a snippet of their calendar of activities. And some of them are deadlines, but most of them are actual activities. And they do things. I think my favorite thing that they do is Matt cleaning. So when they dance for 46 hours, they do so barefoot. That's yeah. So they gotta clean them. They clean them after the event, and they clean them before the next one. And what they do is create a mat cleaning party. So you're going to show up and you're going to scrub down mats that people have been dancing barefoot on for 46 hours. And that is really fun. They got music, they you're dancing, you're you're cleaning with your fee. It's just a party and they create that atmosphere. And that is that is part of the indoctrination. Suzanne grainy is the executive director for diamonds, which is the beneficiary of THON and she talks about THON, and she understands what they're doing fully at the psychological level. You know, she's creating a community and that means building identity around THON and fun. For those who don't know, we didn't say much about what it is. It is completely student run like they swapped peer to peer platforms about six, seven years ago. And the students pick the new platform and they did a hell of a job to like they wrote business requirements, the whole thing. They make all the meaningful decisions, and Suzanne simply creates an environment for them to help build ideas. studies by suggesting this sort of activity like Matt cleaning, a few of them are revenue producing, but not many. There's a 5k. Right? And then there's the 100 days till fun celebration, a family carnival. These are all ways to solidify identity as attached to the mission, have fun, and it works brilliantly. And then this odus, if you can talk about this. Yeah, I'll

50:26  
be able to wrap up here today and take some questions. You know, I think this is so telling, you know, the, the call to action, the solicitation, it's not an invitation to donate. It's an invitation to join on a mission to be part of this community. I think that that that really says, So tells you everything about who they are and what they're trying to do. Okay, so we have question.

50:53  
There's so many good questions. I'm just so excited. I'm going to start with this one. Loretta Levinson. Thanks for your question. But what if you're in the arts and culture vertical and what your fundraising helps fund our events? My answer would be doesn't matter. You're all good. Otis?

51:11  
Great. Oh, done. Just check.

51:18  
To tell me you want to pick any questions out or you want to me to grab some Are we out of time?

51:23  
I know we're not we still have some time Loretta is was the primary one. And I wanted to kind of call out going back to the donor centrism versus community centric item one, I don't think that there's an actual dichotomy. I think what the real issue is donor primacy in those conversations, which is much different than copy and engagement and overall kind of like celebrating the fact that people are part of a larger thing. And April Walker is actually going to be joining us in in you know, about a few minutes and is talking about abundance and community centrism. So folks, if you want to have an augmentation, it's almost like we plan this out. So one and then also the recordings were starting to get published, if you go the replays you might be able to check out Rachel D'souza D'souza Siebert session where she was coaching around difficult conversations from a community centric standpoint. So lots of content, folks. What else? Yeah, we're taking questions. I'm paying attention to questions. We got time maybe for one more folks. I'm gonna put on the stage man. Look at this. I've been doing that throughout the whole thing. By the way. There you go. We have any other questions for our absolute dynamo experts here. I'm reading. We're pretty, we're going to be rewatching it don't worry, Christie, that's why all of these are being recorded and will be actually automatically available within two hours of the event. And then we're going to put them on the neon one website. But this is not going to be the last time that Katrina and Otis are going to be, you know, working with us.

53:07  
Thanks. You know, Ellen had an interesting comment. She said, there's a lot of talk about increasingly transactional nature of human relationships under capitalism, that one yeah. And the harm that this carries for individuals and communities. I think, you know, when you think about how long it takes us to evolve a new trait as a species, you know, we're not evolving at a rate that that's impacting who we are, I think that what we're doing is is learning, you know, we're becoming much more sophisticated in my mind about how people react to things and why Otis has this one graphic. It's an it's in our new book, which is pre orders are going to open on 1031. And it's, what does that chart called? It's called, it's biases and heuristics.

53:54  
Oh, yeah. It's a biases of codecs. Yes.

53:56  
codec. Yeah, that is worth googling the what's the formal title against it once more for the folks?

54:03  
I don't know, Katrina. Again, pulled it out of thin air. Yes, I don't know. We will follow up. If you I think it'd be biases and heuristics Codex. But what you'll find is that psychologists have documented well over 100 Now of these human biases, you know, that these are these are systematic errors and our perception and judgment and so forth. And yeah, we it's, they're there, but we're unaware of them.

54:34  
Yeah. So I think that we're becoming more sophisticated. And we're understanding that capitalism definitely has an impact, but it's on the outside of us, not on the inside of us. So anyway, I think you might be interested in the Codex.

54:47  
Well, let's call out Ashley's comment. I'll put it back up by her. Thank you. This sparked lots of great side texting conversation with my team, also watching the session. And as a kind of a reminder, folks, we're gonna be continuing these conversations in the connected fundraising community. And over the next few weeks, we're going to establish the top 12 conversation points that we want to dive in. So if this type of conversation is one that is going to really hit to the heart and acquisition, and events and things like that come up a long time. But what we want to do is go deeper than just the typical like, well, you should, like, do a few emails and giving Tuesday this way, we want to go deeper for you. So the community is going to choose 12 of the top questions that will answer in 2023. If this is one of them that you want to get deeper on, let's get it on there. We'll start to Ida Katrina Otis. Wow. As expected, thank you so much. We're going to be shifting give, kind of get ready for our next mainstage session. But any final words for us today?

55:57  
I just want to thank you for shepherding and curating the conversation this way. It's I like it that you're going deep and you're not afraid to, to engage in really complex hard to understand topics.

56:10  
I think that especially for smaller, small shop nonprofits, smaller organizations, there's this assumption that they can't handle this type of conversation. And it's certainly for

56:21  
can, looking at the comments clearly they can.

56:25  
All you rock you rock. Thank you very much, folks. We'll see in just a few minutes with April Walker next

56:32  
week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai