A nudge in the wrong direction
Howard Lake | 9 June 2011 | Blogs
A few weeks ago, the Pennies Foundation published some market research that showed that the public “increasingly like giving methods that don’t require long term commitment”. According to Pennies Foundation – which, though I am sure it is of no relevance, makes and markets a giving method that doesn’t require long term commitment – the public had “resoundingly confirmed” that “not having to commit to regular donations, the ability to give small sums at the time of their choosing and to make a spontaneous decision” were key factors that encourage them to donate to charity.
And this was trumpeted as if it were a Good Thing. This is, in fact, a Very Bad Thing.
For the past 20 years, charities have waged a largely successful campaign to move donors from ad hoc cash giving to committed regular giving. The benefits to charities are so obvious and so well rehearsed that I won’t waste space by repeating them here.
So why the celebratory, triumphant tone about a fundraising method that aims to turn the clock back to the late 1980s? The government’s giving white paper is full of examples of this reversionary trend. There are plans to make it easier to give a few spare coppers when paying your supermarket bill, donating a couple of quid (or less) when drawing money out of a cash machine, and making a donation here and there by text.
These ideas seem to be driven by a belief in ‘nudge theory’ – that you can influence social behaviour with a little nudge here and there, making it slightly easier for someone to do something – in this case by rounding up a pound or sending a text. The cumulative effect of all these nudges will be a major shift in behaviour – in this case many more people giving. Or so the theory goes.
The problem is that we are nudging people in the wrong direction. My real fear is that we are nudging people into doing less for charity, not more.
Choosing to support a charity is not always an easy decision. It is often a difficult, carefully-considered decision made in response to an engaging appeal. The prospective donor needs some kind of gut emotional pull into supporting the cause. Alongside positive emotions of hope, empathy and a feeling of being able to do good, perhaps it should also jar emotionally, whether that is because of anger, helplessness, guilt or something else. These are not negative emotions, they are positive ones, spurring and motivating the donor to make a real and lasting commitment to the cause they have just bought into.
Of course we want to facilitate the actual process of giving once the decision has been made, but nudged giving technology just makes it too easy. It takes away all these touchpoints that fundraisers have traditionally used and in the process removes any feelings of guilt that a person might have had about declining a tougher ask. But making it easy to give a little also makes it easy not to give a lot. Faced with a street fundraiser or a DRTV ad asking you to make a regular monthly donation, a person could, hand on heart, without any notion of guilt whatsoever, say that, no thanks, they don’t want to give, because they’ve just rounded up their weekly Tesco’s bill from £76.52 to £77, so they’ve already done their bit.
This shift towards nudged giving highlights a disconnect between what the public expect from charities in terms of fundraising and what charities have to do to raise the money they need. There were two relevant themes contained in the government’s green paper on giving that preceded the white paper: the government is aiming to create a culture of giving while simultaneously supporting charities to become better at asking for donations.
But neither the green paper nor the white paper contained proposals to unify these cultures. What we need is a third culture that will overlap with and weld these two ideals together – a ‘culture of acceptance of being asked’. Yet an emphasis on nudged giving – on rounded pounds on food bills, ad hoc texts, and the occasional extra quid at an ATM – does the opposite. It perpetuates the myth that people ‘give when they choose to and don’t need to be asked’, when every fundraiser really knows that if you don’t ask you don’t get.
The white paper has the laudable intention to help fundraisers become better askers. But it’s unwittingly encouraging the public to turn a deaf ear to those same asks when fundraisers make them.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.