Photos: Aissa Bouabellou on Pexels
This webpage is part of an are of the site for people with at least three years’ trust fundraising experience.
WOW your donors
I don’t claim to be an expert on this material. If you are interested in this style of fundraising, look into the work of Rob Woods and find talks by Andy Watts.
However, people are people and respond in a relational way to warmth, meaningful and delightful experiences. No trust fundraising site would be complete without referencing this material.Thank you- or stewardship-type experiences are the obvious vehicle, but if you’re interested in this, Woods goes into dropping stories into conversations and getting more meetings with major donors.
The “thought leaders” (sorry about that) whom everyone seems to draw on are Chip and Dan Heath (a psychologist and a consultant in industry) and their book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. The following summarises their ideas and there’s then a downloadable table for turning them into an actionable initiative:
Creating peak moments
Key moments are hugely memorable and are therefore being drawn into fundraising. When you try and remember a long event, Chip and Dan Heath say, you may well find that your memory is especially of the peak or trough moment and your evaluation of it emotionally will be an average of the peak or trough moment and how you felt at the end.
That means that peak moments are actually hugely powerful. In the commercial world, the Heath brothers say, the evidence is that you actually increase sales much more by putting your effort into lifting the customer experience from good to great (4/7 or 5/7 to a 6/7 or 7/7) than you do improving the experience of the most miserable customers (lifting the 1/7 or 2/7s).
Qualities of a peak moment
The Heath brothers identify a number of qualities that help to make a moment a peak one:
1. It breaks the script
An example they give is the Magic Castle Hotel – a three-star hotel, that rates third out of all hotels in Los Angeles on Trip Advisor. The reason is the lovely script breaking things they do there. For example, suppose you’re sitting by the (not especially big or plush) pool on a hot day. Your children can call a bright red phone by the pool, the Popsicle Hotline. The phone’s answered “Popsicle Hotline, how may I help you?” and you choose your flavour. A beautifully dressed waiter brings out the popsicle on a silver platter.
It is an extraordinary (and in this case, very fun) experience. It would have been easy to compromise and, say, just put a small freezer of popsicles by the pool (what the authors refer to as “the soul-sucking force of reasonableness”). They don’t. Ripping up and stomping on the script, rather than being “reasonable” is the whole point.
What can you do that’s NOT the normal things trust fundraisers do (whilst still being appropriate and reflecting the donor’s interests)?
2. It’s high stakes in some way
Higher stakes might involve consequences, or deadlines.
We don’t want to make the funder uncomfortable, but live in a world of tremendous transformation. Maybe there’s something with a service user of the funded work who faced exceptional odds, for example, whom they can meet as part of the experience?
3. There’s a strong sensory element to it
This is a recurrent theme in emotional experience in the book. In a wedding: it’s things like the special flowers and location.
When you’re planning something for a funder, how can you bring it to life in a sensory way? If you’re doing a thank you video, maybe it’s the location where it’s happening or the sounds you capture that brings the experience alive, brings it home.
4. The person experiencing it finds insight for themselves
An example Chip and Dan Heth give that seems relevant here is Pret A Manger, whose staff have a very small budget to give customers stuff for free, at their complete discretion. This sensory experience breaks the script, clearly, but it also provides the lucky customer with an insight: this person likes me and feels well towards me. [I go to Pret fairly regularly and this has only happened to me twice. I don’t know if that’s normal, or I’ve had a less positive insight about myself!]
Donors are interested in our work – it’s part of why they fund it. How can the experience help them discover for themselves an insight that they’ll find interesting / valuable / important?
5. It creates pride for the experiencer
Chip and Dan Heath talk about creating milestones / wins on the way to a goal, that you celebrate. However, I think that, if you can’t find a way of creating pride for a trust connected to what they’ve done with you, it’s either not a particularly good project, or you’re possibly in the wrong business.
6. It creates shared meaning
This might involve a synchronised moment highlighting the mission that brings people together, or the bond that brings people together after they have struggled together.
Again, this is an obvious fit for us in some way.
Resources
I deliberately haven’t told you the best stories from the Power of Moments. There’s a great story about creating insights about the need for latrines, for example! It’s a very readable and fun book.
Rob Woods’ Bright Spot podcasts have a lot that turns this into experiences for donors (for example, the first Andy Watts one, or Woods’ interview with Tony Gaston. If you join the bright Spot Members’ Club you’ll get more content again concerning this – there’s a talk where he tries to give as many WOW examples as he can – but you might or might not think there’s enough extra content to justify the normal price of over £300 for a year).
Rob Woods’ work is very good at creating conviction that going the extra mile is worth the effort. He’s supposed to be an excellent trainer. An experienced trusts team manager I know strongly recommended his major donors training, saying it was highly relevant to trust fundraisers.