Photos: My Life Through A Lens and (insert) Christina@wocintechchat.com, on Unsplash
This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
Persuasiveness and rhetoric
When I interview new fledgling trust fundraisers, the ability to persuade is the first quality I look for. As a leading modern scholar of rhetoric, Edward Corbett, says, ‘there is as much rhetoric involved in the “begging letter” as in the most elaborate campaign oratory.’ I’ll give an example from an example of how it can work, from a selection committee that I sat on… We were assessing an application from a school for refugees. To paraphrase the Background section, the author said the following:‘
The origin of the project was with a group of young refugees living in a squalid camp in [the project area]. I was tutoring children in their tents, listening to their heartbreaking stories, as children told me of the horrors they had experienced fleeing [famous group of fighters]. As we studied together, they escaped, and for brief moments they forgot their surroundings. One thing connected these children. They were all desperate to learn.’
The application wasn’t great, but it was very moving – you could see it in the whole panel when we discussed the proposal. The text above use a number of rhetorical techniques to achieve that. because it made that connection with us, we did more for it than we might otherwise have done. The issue needed to be there – otherwise the attempt to connect would have seemed forced, or clumsily manipulative. However, skilful writing brought it out strongly.
This web site draws quite heavily on the theory of rhetoric, taught for thousands of years and about persuading people. Some areas clearly accords with common or leading edge practice. For example, both rhetoricians and leading trusts guru Bill Bruty would suggest bringing out the places where your charity’s/service’s values and those of the trust overlap.
There are three facets to persuasion in rhetoric: showing you are genuinely trustworthy; convincing people logically; and moving them.
All three are important to us. To illustrate: the ACF’s introductory guide to assessment says, ‘We are usually looking at three key questions:
• Is this application eligible for our funding –and of sufficient quality for us to consider it further?
• Is the proposed work a priority for us – are we confident it can deliver the benefits we want to support at a reasonable cost?
• Is the applicant capable of managing our funds well and delivering the work successfully?’
Only a trustworthy applicant can do this. Also, there’s clearly a lot of logic to it all. (Indeed, as an assessor you spend a lot of time trying to apply familiar logical processes.) Trusts will also tell you they like to be moved. Think back to the whole point of the founder setting up the trust, or trustees being involved. It’s quite an emotional process. People are often acting out of compassion, or looking to do something meaningful and fulfilling.
When do you move people and when do you persuade them rationally?
Both seem genuinely important. As that may not fit your worldview, I will say a lot about this one point!
It’s easy to imagine that educated professionals will act out of almost pure intellect when making decisions. However, a Cabinet Office study found that, when asked would they pledge a day’s salary to charity, investment bankers were twice as likely to do this if they’d been given a small bag of sweets on the way into the meeting. (Applying Behavioural Insights to Charitable Giving, Cabinet office Behavioural Insights Team (2013))
When do you use rationality and when do you try and move people? My experience is that the rationality and emotion mix up – you can be in one and then swap to the other, then back. The discussions can be rational, but there’s still an underlying emotional heft – you’re deciding issues for people in need and for volunteers at least, the emotions are why we’re there.
Researcher into persuasion and sales – Michael D Harris argues that for decisions that are straightforward, involving just a few variables, people think rationally. In my personal experience, processes like assessing eligibility and eliminating projects on the basis of risk, it seemed like a very rational process. On the other hand, then you have to make very complex decisions, Harris argues, people act more intuitively. When deciding is it better to make a £50k capital grant to a major youth arts project or to split the money amongst some other projects in different fields – that felt more intuitive. If something is intuitive, if people are deeply moved, that is likely to help your chances.
Harris suggests that, although the process might seem rational, there are some ex post facto justifications of emotional decisions going on. That has certainly been true in my case and I strongly suspect of other assessors I’ve seen. You need a reason you can give. Classical rhetoricians would also say that if you move people then they are more likely to accept your logic.
Other considerations are:
- According to rhetoric theory, in crowds (a group of trustees?) emotional approaches can have more cut-through, whereas an individual assessor tends to be more logical.
- People will trust you more if what you say seems logical sense. As an assessor, I’ve personally found it easier to go with a project if I get the common sense of it “in my gut” and I’ve heard other fundraisers describe the best appeals as having a simple common sense to them. It’s hard to go with the emotion of the speaker if you don’t trust what they’re saying, e.g., because it doesn’t make sense.
- Behavioural economics would say that something highly familiar, where the trust probably has an opinion, is likely to be processed differently (just by classifying it) whereas with something new, emotion/intuition could play more of a part.
In practice, logic and intuition are intertwined and you forget either at your peril.
Training presentation on using rhetoric in trust fundraising
