And in the future
Howard Lake | 1 September 2009 | Blogs
Other research in temporal decision making has shown …
Emotion discounts faster than logic. In plain English what this means is that when people make decisions about the future, they pay more attention to the logic underlying their decisions. As a consequence, although a charity might use a solicitation designed to evoke an emotional response in donors, for this emotion to offer utility in prompting a legacy, donors need to be encouraged to think through why they experience that emotion.
Negative outcomes also discount faster than positive outcomes. Therefore, if materials evoking emotion are used, positive emotion will be more effective in the future context than negative emotion. This occurs because as human beings we are naturally more optimistic about the future than the present. Research has also shown that people think of themselves as being better people in the future than they are today and that in the future we place more emphasis on the pro’s of a particular event rather than its con’s. In other words we romanticize. Our choice of copy should therefore reflect this reality and be crafted differently from our regular solicitations. Fundraisers also need to be aware that since that individuals will naturally tend to have a more optimistic view of the future, to secure a legacy, they will have to offer something more than the donor is currently expecting to be offered to beneficiaries.
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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.