Did you know that telling stories helps increase donations?

I read an article today called Why Telling One Person’s Story Moves Your Constituents to Action which talks about the “identifiable victim theory”. Put simply, the theory says that we are more likely to donate in response to one person’s story rather than the story of a group or village.

The article says “The theory states that when we feel like we’re helping a single person or victim, we tend to donate more. For example, hearing about Joe who has a disease and how it affected him would cause us to donate more than hearing about the disease in general and how it affects thousands of people.”

Why do you think this is so?

It’s important to understand that when it comes to making a donation, people act from the heart, not the head.  If there is no emotional element in your fundraising efforts they will never be as successful as you wish.

Boosting the emotional content is simple when you focus on telling the story of an individual.  When you write about a group you are landing on the target but when you write about the struggles and sufferings of one person, you are hitting the bullseye.

If you don’t think it works, take a look at the example in the article and ask yourself how you could possibly resist giving something to help.

Look at events such as the Good Friday Appeal for the Royal Children’s Hospital.  The website holds stories of the struggles of little children. The appeal day is filled with the individual stories of babies who have been cared for by the hospital.  They have guests to interview who are able to tell of what they went through and how the hospital saved their lives. The result is an amazing amount of money donated in a short amount of time.

The more opportunities you can offer that will allow your donors to experience an emotional connection or reaction to an individual, the better your donation results will be.

How can you respectfully use the stories of the people your not for profit is helping?