Don’t you just love those studies that state the obvious?
I know I get a good laugh anytime I hear scientists proudly proclaim such well known truths like “smoking is dangerous to your health” or “living next to or around an industrial zone increases your likely hood of cancer and other diseases”.
Thanks for the news flash, but if anyone doesn’t ‘get it’ by now then the likely hood of a new study imparting any new knowledge is slim to none!
In a recent post on the Donor Power Blog, a new psychological study relating to fundraising is examined.
Here’s the re post from the Donor Power Blog…
“I love those human guinea pig psychological studies that claim to inform us about fundraising realities. Their findings tend to be either blindingly obvious or laughably wrong.
Here’s one, reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Prospecting blog: Want Bigger Gifts? Ask People to Volunteer Before Asking for Money, with the study itself available here.
The gist:
Asking people to volunteer their time at a charity before asking for their money increases the amount they ultimately give to an organization…
Wow! And how did they come up with that conclusion? They put college students in artificial situations and asked their opinions on how much they’d theoretically give to a phony organization. Oh, and the total study group was less than 200 people — a number so laughably insignificant that a direct marketer wouldn’t pay attention to it.
Don’t take this type of study as gospel truth. The best they give us are ideas and directions that we can explore with real testing.
In this case, the studies point out a phenomenon that most good fundraisers understand: Someone who’s done something for you is more likely to do something else for you.
That’s why someone who’s given to an organization is ten or more times likely to give again than someone who’s never given. And the more times someone has given, the more likely they are to give again.
It might also tell us that volunteers are very warm prospects to become donors. As are event participants.
But don’t take my word for it. Test it for yourself.”