Welcome, everyone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar Drive Donations with Expert Empathy. My name is Ann Weller and it's a pleasure to introduce our speaker for today. For over 25 years, Adam Olenn has been asking provocative questions to help companies better serve their customers. A veteran of first wave digital agency management, consulting firms K-12 and higher education institutions, He is the founder of Russell and Spark, a strategic creative agency. A masterful storyteller, he uses the power of story to convey compelling principles of communication while ensuring everyone enjoys the journey. Welcome, Adam. Thank you so much. And so thank you, everyone who is joining us today. It's an amazing I run Russell and Spark, which is a strategic communications firm. Everything we do is a three step process. Focus on brand, understand the business objectives, and then unroll the creative toolkit to use the brand as the lever to move those objectives forward. It's a full stack agency. We do everything from company and organization naming to identities, websites and content. So we see projects through not just recommending strategy and walk away. Course, we've done a lot of corporate work, but believe very strongly in education and have worked with institutions of higher learning. Independent schools nationwide and internationally leading colleges like Berkeley, Southern New Hampshire University and MIT, Harvard Business School and Small Schools down to a rural Montessori school in Colorado. So the whole gamut. And the reason for that is we believe that education is a powerful force for good, and we like supporting those who support education. Today, we're going to be talking about expert empathy, fundraising with feeling how to use emotions to drive better engagement and donations. Humans are social creatures. At least we were until COVID got in the way. And now here in 2021, we're a full year of no galas, no parties, no auctions, no guest lectures, no speaker series doing everything remotely and to a fundraiser. It probably feels like working with both hands tied behind your back to overcome those challenges. Every message you share needs to resonate powerfully with the recipient so that you can connect and get the action that you need. My father passed away earlier this year and one of the things that he taught me that is really stuck with me in thinking about this presentation is he like to say anything done with artistry is art? So when I think about the art of sales, there is probably no higher expression of that art than the fundraiser. In a normal sales transaction, you give me money and I give you things that could be legal services, it could be sneakers, it could be a new car. But there is an exchange of money for something in fundraising. You give me money and I give you a good feeling about how you helped. Thank you very much. It takes a lot to get that to happen. Your messaging, your people skills, your ability to connect with the prospect and enroll them in a sense of shared value. It has to be flawless. And that is beautiful to see when when people do that well. And so I want to share what we know about the persuasive arts with you in case any of this helps you sharpen your game and the things you're already doing well. So what you're going to learn in this webinar first, how people make decisions ultimately every every form of sales, but especially fundraising, is getting someone to make a decision that you want them to make. So to do that, you need to know how does it how did decisions get made in the first place? And then, you know, where where are the things that you can control or influence, too? How do we apply that understanding of decision making to fundraising specifically? And we're going to look at a couple of tactical areas and really get very direct about how we use these principles in connecting to these activities. So it doesn't all just sort of sit in the theory realm. It's going to come down to the practical. And then lastly, we're going to look at Principles of influence based and Robert Cialdini. His research will examine through the lens of productive empathy. So on to number one, how do people make decisions? It's a mixture of brain construction, the actual parts of the brain and psychology. And if there are any neurologists on the call, I apologize. This would be very reductive. But I am not a neurologist. I'm a professional communicator. So good enough for me. I hope it's good enough for you to specifically, here's how a decision gets made. First, you evaluate all the rational factors up here in the prefrontal cortex. That's this red blob up front, the part behind your forehead. That's where, say, you're considering a new vehicle for your family. That's where you're thinking about seating capacity and mileage and resale value and safety stats. And how easy is it to climb in and out of? And can I tell you something or put something on the roof? You're evaluating all these factors as you consider different options and you go through all that. And then the prefrontal cortex basically issues a report that says this is the decision we recommend, and it sends that report down into the cerebellum, which is a sort of brown and walnut looking thing that's sort of at the base of your brain right in the middle at the bottom where the brain stem comes into the brain itself. That's where the cerebellum sits. And down there are a lot of very powerful and primal structures, including your decisions, which every decision is binary. Even a complex decision is a series of binary things, yes or no, left or right, this or that. So the prefrontal cortex considers all the factors, says the report, down to the cerebellum, where choice is made, this one or that one. However, there is another thing that happens down in the cerebellum the decision to which has a roommate in there and its roommate is your emotions, your feelings live in the cerebellum, broadly speaking. Again, apologies, neurologists who could say, well, there's more to it than that. But basically the emotions of the cerebellum with the decisions which the emotions are in the room where it happens, you make your decision and that decision gets sent back up to the prefrontal cortex, where it gets compared against the report that was issued of what we ought to be doing here. And normally they line up and there and your brain goes, Oh, yes, that's why we made that decision. Very good. You explain to yourself all over again why it was a good decision to make. It's a point. It doesn't come back matching the report. That's when this part experiences conflict. It's literally this part of your brain. And when you make a decision, it doesn't seem to make rational sense. What part of your body do you touch? And oh, why did I do that? If you're ever pressed on a decision that doesn't seem to make rational sense, look at the language that we use to express that moment, to explain ourselves. So prefrontal cortex examined all of those factors. Honey, I'm going to get a minivan. You get in the showroom. Oh, it's bread, it's fast. You come home with a sports car. Why did you do that? I didn't know. It just felt right. We are accurately describing what happened in our brain. We thought this was right, but we felt that was right. And when it comes down to a mano a mano between what you think and what you feel, what you feel always wins. Know sometimes that the stakes will be high enough. So we got to go undo do that. But in the moment of deciding, emotions have powerful, powerful sway. So knowing that the emotions are what's really driving things, would you like to know how to influence those emotions? Of course. So there is one communication strategy that influences emotions more powerfully than any other. In fact, you are incapable of resisting this technique. We all are. I am. You are. This is just how we're wired. Like all animals, we learn from experience. But unlike all other animals, we learn from other people's experiences too. And the way we do that is through story. The story is possibly humanity's greatest evolutionary leap, and our brains have actually evolved. Structures have grown in the brain that make it so that our brains are really like story catching and story sharing machines. This is what we're made for. It's how we have come to be as successful a species as we have. And the fact is, you really can't do anything about it. Once the story starts happening, you lock it as soon as a story experience begins. And notice I didn't just say someone tells a story because that suggests an active passive paradigm where the teller is active but the listener is passive. That's not how stories work. Stories are a shared experience. The teller and the listener both participate in the creation. The teller supplies the words, the hearer supplies, the pictures, and as soon as the story starts to happen, your your brain floods your body with two powerful hormones. One is cortisol, which is focus and attention, and the other is oxytocin, empathy and bonding. Now there's a magic incantation that can make this work. You don't need the incantation, you can suggest it or you can say it outright. But once upon a time did you feel, how is those words happened? Like, it's almost like the water went still and you kind of felt yourself lean in because once upon a time is our universal signal for story here. And hormones just pump into your body that make you pay attention and bring you emotionally closer to the teller and to the events of the story. And as far as your brain can tell, what happens in the story is real. You know, the prefrontal cortex says, Oh, you're just listening to a story. But the deeper learning parts of your brain just experience what happens in the story as though you were living. And so these simulations, we're learning by living out other people's experiences, whether they're real or made up through the the learning apparatus we have because of stories ability to create that simulation in our mind. So I want to show you an example of two different ways of communicating for the same company. One that is more sort of typically direct and expository and explanatory, one that is more story based. So now everyone on this call is a great reader. So this is the only time I'm going to read at you. This is some corporate copy for a journalist. Excuse me, This is some corporate copy for a German pharmacy chain. Doc Morris Architect Doc Morris has consistently broken new ground since it was founded in 2000 with innovative solutions and new services for patients in the health sector. Today, it is Europe's largest mail order pharmacy. Does that seem forgettable? Like it could be any company anywhere? Let's try another approach and see through story the difference that good health makes in someone's life. It's. So tell me, did you care if he could lift her when he got to the street? Of course she did. I've seen this thing dozens and dozens and dozens of times, and it still gets me every time. Why? Because I can't resist it. I'm a human being. I empathize with other people. I get pulled into this story, and that's a big part of what makes us successful. That ability to empathize is the key psychological driver of social cohesion. And social cohesion is what means when it comes down to just one person versus a wooly mammoth that goes to the mammoth every time. But if we can work together, suddenly we've got food for the whole village, for the winter, and we can make those in the name of skiing, which I'm told is very, very warm. I haven't tried it myself. So knowing that these these emotional triggers are so powerful and these mechanisms can really drive people, let's look at how to use them productively. First, you need to think of the secret of life, because there's so much coming at us every day that cutting through the noise requires getting back to core principles. And when I say core principles, I mean the gospel, specifically the Gospel of Curly. The Gospel of Curly. You say? Yes, the Gospel of Curly. If you've ever seen City Slickers, Curly is played by Jack Francis, this old cowboy leading Billy Crystal down the old trail and says, You want to know the secret to life? What your finger no one thing do with one thing. What's the one thing that's a you can figure out? But focus is what makes stories work. And the lack of focus is what makes them fail most often. And this lesson was taught to me, most powerful by a man named Ron Katz, who started the Veterans Writing project. If you know anyone who is a veteran struggling with trauma, I cannot recommend his program highly enough. He, for 25 years served in the in the Army, the first 15 as a soldier and the last ten as basically be the armed forces reporter who would write down in very dry military prose what happened. You know, these forces came in from air. They did that. So many wounded, so many killed. You know, who went where afterwards? All this kind of thing. And during those 25 years, wherever things were worst in the world, that's where you would find Ron Capps, whether that was Rwanda, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia, all everywhere. Things were going haywire, is where he got sent. And he told me two stories that really show the power of focus in in making a story cut through the noise. When he was in Rwanda, he recalled driving down a highway and on either side of the highway, about as high as the roof of the Humvee were black hedges, just as far as the eye could see, stretching out into the distance. Hedgerows, like you might find in England. Except they weren't. HEDGES There were stacks of bodies for miles and miles and miles. Years later, when he was in Albania as a reporter, military reporter, they drove into a village just as fighting had ceased. In fact, as they were driving in, they could see the rebels disappearing over hills in the distance. And so they get into this village where things are smoking. And on fire, and there's rubble everywhere and shell casings. And they walk into the center of this village. And from out of a small hut comes a woman dressed in rags with a bundle of rags in her hands, and she runs right up to Ron and thrust this bundle of rags into his chest. And he looks down and it's a baby. It's a four month old baby boy. And this woman is saying, Please, please, you have to take my son. They're killing all of the males of any age they can find. If they find my boy, they will kill him. Please take my baby. She's asking this man to take her shaft, knowing she would never see him again because that's his only chance to live. Now, the first story, the scale of tragedy. The first story is it's many orders of magnitude greater than the scale of the tragedy. In the second story, in that Rwanda story, we're talking about thousands of lives in the story of the Albanian village. We're talking about one. Why does that one move so much more than the first one? It's because we're focused on our character on one human moment that we can connect to emotionally and profoundly right. Story of Rwanda because it's so aggregate. There's nothing to fix your attention on that. Then activate your emotions. This is why it's so important to focus, and this is something that many, many communicators get wrong, not just because corporations do it all the time, but I see it very frequently in educational clients work and it comes from a good place all the time. We serve a diverse population. We got to show a lot of people and that's how you get photos like this one. With all these happy kids. The great is happy. It is. It is happy. And if you need a photo of happy kids, this is a very well done one. It gives a great the lighting's good. It's vibrant and lively. However, there's no story here. I don't know where to focus. I don't know what's important. Now, I could make this image start to speak by inventing stories here. I will make this image speak to different ways and show you that it could be an example of two different stories. But the image itself isn't either one, which is why I can just make up stories and have it still work. Let's say in story one. This is a school in Indonesia, heavily Muslim country, and until this year girls weren't allowed. But this September, girls got to start going to school here. And this is how it's going, right? Your eye immediately locks in on this on the kids over here on the side of the frame. These two girls are having a great time. This other one sort of peeking behind the shoulder. They jump out of the picture for you. They begin to create a locus of attention that you can fix on. Okay, different story. We'll get rid of that one school's been around for 40 years, so whatever. There's no gender thing there. And this fall, a boy joined the class. It's from a very difficult family situation and he's completely withdrawn. He isn't engaging with his peers, barely engaging with teachers, really struggling, very isolated, not forming any friendships completely inside himself. And last week, somebody finally broke through. So here he is at the bottom of the frenzy picking up. He is now entering the social environment of the school and becoming part of this community in a full and happy way. Okay. Both both wonderful stories, really charming. And you can make this photograph speak. But if the kid were at the really in the center of the picture, it would be I would be able to intuit that there is a story in who it's about. Even before I've heard in in that narrative context that I was just making up. When these pictures happen, it's often motivated by, well, we serve a diverse population. We've got to get everybody in the photo. You don't make it about one person. Now, the reason that works is because time is on your side. You don't only get to tell one story in this life, you can tell a lot of stories. So sure, tell a story about a girl today and tell a story about a boy tomorrow. And if you have other student, if you have other identities that you need to work through for other kinds of people that you want to show, for whatever reason, give them each their moment in the spotlight, a series of. So those is more meaningful than just a big sort of chorus shot. Now, many aspects of fundraising have adapted pretty well covered, some haven't. And specifically, I want to talk a little bit about events. They're really challenging in a COVID world, but there are ways to make them successful. We've helped some schools do that, and so I'm going to share the the approaches that we engage with those fine schools. In case you want to take advantage of the results so early in COVID, we're about six weeks in a school in Colorado reached out to us. They were a few weeks away from their big fundraiser from the year and everyone said they should cancel. Their internal team felt they should cancel their national provider of auction software if they should cancel. The only person who didn't was the the director of development. She wanted to press forward and got in touch with us. And as we talked, we realized there is an opportunity to be successful here. And so what we did was we used the principles of story architecture, knowing how story can move people emotions in ways that drive their decisions. We used story architecture as a way of creating a run of show that wouldn't get people in the right emotional place to take action at the appropriate time when they needed to make the action. The advice they'd been given by their fundraising consultants was that they should expect to make about $0.10 on the dollar. So if you know, if goal is 100, they should expect to be down 90% and only get about 10% of what they wanted. This approach, they ended up raising 120% of goal a few months later, after everyone was completely sick of Zoom and nobody wanted to do anything on Zoom, another school called us saying they had to do a Zoom fundraiser. They really didn't want to think about canceling, but had been advised to get it in touch before they made their final decision. And after talking with them, the the team was really excited. Everybody got pumped up and they raised 140% goal. So we know how it works. I wish we first know who's good at creating this architecture and Colby was good at it. Hollywood, Hollywood, Netflix, HBO, the film industry writ large here in 2021, we are surrounded by more stories than ever. When I was a kid, there were the three network channels on PBS, and if you held the antenna just right and put one hand on your brother, you might be able to get some cartoons to come in on one of those sort of weird way high UHF channels. Now, when cable came along, there were 600 channels and we thought that was a lot. And now in 2021, 600 channels. Are you kidding me? Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Paramount, Disney, Plus, HBO, Go. There is more quality content, not just absolute content, but really good stuff on my TV and probably yours right now. Then I could get through if all I did was watch TV for the rest of my life. And the thing that that I'm going to use the word Hollywood, even though obviously we're being more expansive than just classic Hollywood. They have refined the storytelling form for maximum emotional effect. Because emotions equal dollars. And so they've gotten really good at it. Now, the most important principle in creating an emotional effect is relativity. And that is there is no emotional zero. You can't be seven degrees happy or three degrees sad. There is no measurement scale and there's no set point. Emotions and emotional reactions only exist in context with whatever came right before them. And I call this principle drawing the bow. You have to draw the bow if you want an emotional reaction. You must draw the bow. And that means if I want an arrow to go up, I must first draw the bow down. When I release, the arrow goes up. If I want the air to go down, a must draw the bow up. When I released the arrow Goes Down. If you think of any sports movie ever seen right before, the big game, when it's all on the line right before that, what happens? The team captain blows out her knee. The coach gets sick. Somebody steals the bobsled. Something happens that makes it all fall apart. Why? Because by making things terrible, we go down. So in the next moment, when they win the big game, we go up. Right? If we were just modeling, wanted to win the big game. That's a difference of about Yay, big. Okay. But if I can make things worse, then when they win the big game, the difference is that big and that big emotional swing is what makes you have a bigger emotional reaction or the bigger narrative. So it gives you a bigger emotional reaction. So you want to make sure that you're always drawing the bow and finding a way to perceive the effect you want with its opposite so that the effect you want it feels bigger. Now there is a classic road map you can follow. And when I say classic, I mean classic. As in from the classical period, Aristotle came up with three act structure in the poetics really worth a read. It's only around 85 pages. And at cocktail parties, once you have those again, you can say, Oh yes, I've just been reading some Aristotle Aristotelian three act structure basically boils down to this. You start with a problem, you go on a journey to solve it, and then eventually there's a solution. And each of those sections of a Aristotelian three act structure has its own inner structure. And I'll show that to you now. So act one, the problem, you start out in the joyful parts back when everything was good, i.e. once upon a time. It doesn't matter what time, it doesn't matter if it was long ago or far in the future. But there was a time and in that time, here's how life was until trouble arrived. Trouble is, anything that upsets the existing order of things in trouble can be bad. Trouble can be good. Good trouble is a good thing. But something has come in to upset the balance. Trouble arrives and then there's a debate. Is it worth solving this now for you? If the if the problem is worth solving and it is solvable, you have a story. If the answer either of those questions is no, your story is over. Just not solvable. Excuse me. Or if it's not worth solving, let's see if the problem that we're having lunch in our kitchen and we notice a line of ants coming in the house, is that a problem for solving? Yes. We don't want it into the house. Is it solvable? Sure. We buy some hit traps. Okay. Not much of a story. What if we're sitting in that same kitchen and we happen to live on an island and the radio crackles to life with news that there is a tidal wave that will wash away our town in one hour. Is that worth solving? Yep. Is it solvable? We don't know. But we're going to try. Now it's starting to feel like a story, right? The smaller the, the smaller your chances of being able to solve it or something. Similar possibility. The better. And the more interesting that story is going to be to the journey, yet have some early success to feel like, oh, actually this is going to be solved. We can do this, we're going to pull it off. You know, that brings a lot of energy into the narrative and into everyone's feelings. They want to pull together because it feels like success is achievable. And then, of course, you run into some happens, which you have to overcome. Some runs, even worse happens. So, you know, the thing that much of the story there, the tidal wave OC tidal wave, one hour we've got a bus, get everyone from the village on the bus and we're going to drive out of here. Great early success. Everybody's on the bus, hit the road, blew the bridges out headwinds but somebody has a backpack for a route so we can get the rope across the river. And now we're getting everyone across. Great. We're overcoming those headwinds. Whatever the next step is, it's going to have to be even worse than the bridge being so that the story feels like the urgency continues to mount as we move forward. And then the third phase, the solution, the end of your story. There has to come a moment of poignant need and a decisive moment where you have to take action and then that actually leads you to the uplifting coda and the in the case of a classical comedy, a happy endings story, or it brings you to a place of resolution at terrible cost in the case of a tragedy. Now, as fundraisers, you're going to want to stick to the former tragedies with no happy ending aren't great for fundraising because they invoke all the wrong emotions before an uplifting story. The most effective thing you can do as a fundraiser is break the break the barrier between the story and the reality that your prospect is living right here in this moment. If the story is great and it's going along and we get to the moment of decisive action, that's when you can turn to your prospect and say, okay, you know what the problem is? You know what the journey has been. And now this is the moment where this entire thing is going to it's going to succeed or fail, but not based on the actions of everyone in the story that I've been telling you. They are all doing everything they can now. They need someone else to step in and help them get over the top and that someone is you need you to make a gift that will help get them over the top. They've done everything they can do. You've seen it, you've heard it and felt it. But now another player is needed to get us there. And by bringing the prospects in at that moment, they are now part of the story. And so that amplifies their emotional connection, the empathy and their focus. And that gets them to the point of making the decision that you want them to make. Now, if it feels like a lot, it is. And and we're sitting in a time that is frankly quite overwhelming, right? There are huge challenges facing humanity. And all of us are feeling to some extent, overwhelmed by all of it. It's just this big, busy world and it feels like we're too small to make a difference, but we're not. In fact, this can work powerfully for you by meeting the moment. What moment? You have plenty to choose from. Climate change, police violence, racial inequity, gender discrimination, income inequality. All of these are huge social problems that we all want to fix and yet feel like what? What can I do? Well, that's a great question. And I'll make the point this way by showing you, Tom, still the strongest man in the world to beat Donald Trump, it's still something that is £602, 6 to £602, the strongest man in the world. And yet, if you look at the pyramids of Egypt, one block in the great pyramids was 20 £500. Good luck with that, Tom. The strongest man in the world can do it. And I'm no Tom. I know I can't do it. I don't know. Maybe you can lift 20 £500, but I don't know anyone who can. But we can do it together. And that social cohesion is how we've been able to do big things since we were Neanderthals. This is the key to our success is working together. And instead what is an institution, but a bunch of people working together on a common purpose. And so when you can link your institution to any of these big things that are on people's hearts, but they feel incapable of taking meaningful action to address themselves, when you can say, Hey, yeah, we're actually doing something as an institution, you can be part of that. You give them a way to work on the problem. They want to in a way that feels like it might actually be successful, right? This is is it solvable and is it worth solving? Is climate change solvable as an individual? No. Is it worth solving as humanity? Is it solvable when we work together as humanity? You bet it is. So what can we do together to make that happen now we've cut back bit so all that's very intellectual. The thing to remember about emotions is they're very fast. They're as fast as a first impression. How fast is a first impression? May be tempted to say the blink of an eye. Well, actually, the blink of an eye is about 130 milliseconds. We form first impressions in about 50 milliseconds. That's about a third of a blink of an eye. First impressions are very, very fast and very, very durable. If you've studied research into confirmation bias, one thing you learn is that the old advertising slogan never get a chance to make a first impression is really accurate. And so it's critical that you make a good first impression. Now, for many institutions, whether this is education, institutions, corporations, what have you, your first impression is often your website. That's where they kind of meet the organized issue. And when we look at websites, we think of the Tolstoy principle. Tolstoy websites are a natural fit, right? Well, it's also they said that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. We find sort of that all good websites are good in their own special way, but bad websites are bad and pretty much all the same way. And that is they're like the worst sales rep in the world. And that they just talk at you, talk at a not asking any questions without having an inviting dialog. And that invitation can happen at multiple levels. It can happen at the surface level where, you know, the text and the images on the website, the content, but can also happen structurally and when you think about a structure that invites dialog, you begin to invite the other person just as they participate in your story, they start to participate in your corporate narrative or your institutional narrative. So here's an example of how structure can do it. This is a pretty typical school website in that there are eight categories across the top. There's anywhere from 10 to 15 things per dropdown. So that's a total of around 100 choices that you need to choose one of in your in your first engagement with this site. That's a lot. If you've decision paralysis, you know that once you get above six options, people's likelihood to take action on any option drops off a cliff. There's a famous experiment by Sheila Angat out of UC Davis, the JAMB experiment, where she put six different kinds of jelly on a table and you could taste them. And by some, and then reran the same experiment with 32 flavors every flavor, your heart desires. But what happened? People tasted more, but they bought less when there were 32 jars. Actually bought more when there were six because they could make a decision, they didn't feel overwhelmed by the number of choices. So here's a different I'm showing you a school now in Houston where the question that we asked was, what do parents care about? Now, most schools will present a structure similar to this that basically maps your chart about admissions, athletics, arts, etc., as that is a very internal way. And it makes sense, right? That's the process. The process is you get all of the administrative heads around the table and decide what should be on the website and they'll say, well, I think should be on the website and they reach a compromise and there you go. And the one person not in that conversation is the customer. And so with this school, we said, what if we only invited the customer to the table with everybody else out until we really understood what the customer needed and who is a customer in shopping for a school? What's a parent, and do they care about your school? They do not. They care about their child. And even if they have five children, there's one that has them thinking there's got to be more for her. So if you're an admissions professional, what what behavior would you engage in to further that conversation? The very first thing you'd ask is what grade is your child in? Okay, so we had the website just do what a good sales rep would do and ask that question. And she's going into fifth grade group. Then you click on five and that takes you to a page that has all the departments but contextualized around a fifth grade experience. So and written in such a way that we get the reader imagining their child's year in sixth grade and the things he or she is doing, the things the field trips they're going on, the guest lectures they're going to hear from all those kinds of things, making that story come alive in the person's mind so that they are seeing their child in their mind's eye, having this great experience at this school. It's all about their kid. In fifth grade. And the traffic to the inquiry page with this model went up 800%. Now, bunch of fundraisers. This is the part where like, wait a minute, this isn't an admissions webinar. You're right. And the reason I showed you this, because I want you to notice what's not on this page, giving back. Now there is a link to giving under the school dropdown and that's well and good luck to them to be able to find it if they look it up. But why is there no giving? But I've been in many, many website redesigns, agency side and client side and that quest that is always a topic of fierce debate. And we were able to settle it because we realized that we if you put a giving button here, you're not really paying attention to the users. Different kinds of users use your website differently so people don't wake up in the morning and say, I want to go make a gift. All right, let's not let's not try and change their habits. Let's use their habits. A parent might say, I want a different school for my child and then go look at schools, just, oh, no, shut up. But every person who's going to give a gift to an institution of learning has some prior relationship with that institution. They there, their kid went there. There is a research initiative that they have a professional connection to. Right. There is there's already some connections. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, I want to give school X some money. It's almost always in response to outreach by the school, email, direct mail, phone call, personal visits, social media. There's some way that you reached out first the donor then responds to and because their responding you can reach out in the first place with a door that's just for them. So that that walking in out of nowhere experience can be good for people who tend to walk in other no admissions visitors. But if you're going to send a link to his perspective and say, Hey, come check out our website, there's nothing that says it has to be that link. Make it especially. It's suited to donors and the things that they care about because they're already part of the story. Give them a separate door. That's fine tuned for them and they have a better experience, as do your admissions people, instead of sort of forcing a compromise that makes each of those areas weaker than it could be because now every part of your development cycle should get interrogated in this way. And the way that we like to look at it and Russell and Spark is, what's the real world behavior that gets success? So if it's sales, how do sales people behave? What are the questions they ask? What's the process they go through that leads to success? And then let's create an artifact that copies that. Whether that's a website or direct mail campaign, it doesn't matter or an event, but understanding what is what people do well and then make things that echo that, that's the most efficient way to get those things to perform the business function that you need. So those are some tactical considerations. Remember, we're going to look at how we make decisions and apply that to a few tactics, and then we're going to get into some key principles and we're about to get into the principles. But before we do, I want you to remember five questions. What does this piece work The way we expect our people to. That's what we just discussed it, right? Look at how our people are successful and then make artifacts that may or that behavior doesn't show care for the prospects concerns. Or is it are we demonstrating that we understand where they're coming from? Are we empathizing with them so that they will empathize with us? Are you asking what job needs doing? That may be the most important thing. It's very common for to feel like you need you need to go back to acts without stepping back and say, Well, why do I need that tool? Because I'm trying to accomplish this goal. Well, let's examine that goal fully so that we know what the right tool sets are, because oftentimes it's a combination of things, not any one thing that will get you to success. Does. The piece that I'm making activate a story in the Prospect smile and notice. I didn't say tell a story. I said activate a story because there are a lot of different ways to get that story and experience blooming in someone's mind. And it can be by just telling it, showing it in pictures or putting the right pieces in front of someone so that they assemble the story themselves. And I this is perhaps the most effective model of storytelling because the more the person begins to create the narrative on their own, the more it belongs to them. The more emotionally invested they are and the more likely they are to take action to get to an emotional outcome that they would like. And then lastly, does whatever I'm making focus on information or emotion? There is a time and a place for information, but it's not. Upfront information should support an emotional conclusion. If you can get someone to quickly feel a given response is correct and then give them the information that backs that up. Now your emotions are quick, so you've spoken quickly to the thing in the decision making area, and then it's going up to the prefrontal cortex, where you're now supplied with data that says, yep, that checks out. That's a good decision. You should go ahead and do that. That's the right order of operations to leverage their decision making process and brain structures to get them to where you need them to be. Right now, I'd like to share with you some research that is just too good not to share. It's not ours, but it's wonderful. And so I'm going to pass it on to you. And that is using a productive empathy. Look at the six principles of influence as defined by Robert Cialdini, who's his work is fantastic. He's written a boatload of bestsellers. Read them all. I have no relationship with Robert Cellini. We don't get a cut of the books. They're just so good that I want to share that with you, and I hope it's as meaningful for you as it has been for me. All right. The first principle of influence, reciprocity, that is, as human beings, we are gift givers. That's how we interact with each other. It's how we signal social value to one another and and and meaningfulness how we say this is an important moment. You are important to me. Now, what's important is a gift. It can't be fake. It has to be of an appropriate level of value and given free. Right. I'll give you this. If you give me that, that's not a gift. That's a transaction. It's just a simple trade. And there really is no relationship building in that. That's a simple, Hey, look at the value of X in the value of Y. If you think it's it's a good exchange, then we'll do it. But there's no relationship there. I gift this. Here, take this. I want you to have it. Whether or not you give me anything doesn't matter. But I want you to have this because you are important to me. Now, the reciprocity is the drive within you to now want to give something to me or vice versa. And if reciprocity didn't exist, it would be very hard to have society if every time somebody did something, somebody out there just retired and took off, then you're not building the bonds that help them hold together when the wooly mammoth comes over the horizon. Right. That reciprocity is part of what binds people together and gives them the empathy to help one another out and do things that would benefit the other person, even if it doesn't benefit themselves directly. And a good gift also shows that you're paying attention and being specific in in what you choose to give someone. The second principle that influence is social proof. Where when we don't know what to do, we often look and see what other people do. And this is an almost irresistible drive. If you're walking down the street and ten people are looking up, you will look up, you'll see. You don't need to think about it. You just see what's up there. And this is one of the ways we know that our own perspective and experience is limited and if there are a whole bunch of people who seem to have come to a conclusion with all their different experiences, all the different perspectives that suggest to us that they may be on something. And so we sort of delegate out our trust. Now, if there are suspect motives, this immediately goes out the window, right? A bunch of testimonials that you think are faked or planted, they all lose credibility instantly. So it's important to just be authentic. This is also a place where schools, colleges, universities, because of the closeness of the community, the closer the community, the more powerful the social drive can be. The third principle of influence is commitment. So I got here an image from Glengarry Glen Ross when I call him a saying, I'll always be closing in. He's a heartless, heartless sales manager in this movie, but the principal actually has a lot of merit to it. And when I say always be closing, that means getting your prospect to make decisions. The decisions don't have to be gifts. Gift. Gift, give. Gift. It's. Can I call you Tuesday? That's specific. You've asked them to make a specific decision about yes or no. And the more reasonable those requests and the more they see, the more reasonable they are, the more they will say yes to them. The more yeses you get stacked up, the more the prospect will want to continue to say yes, to be consistent with their past decisions. And so they like committing to small things. You set them on the path to commit to bigger things. But again, this has to be framed around their beliefs, their values. Right? You want to you want to find something they've already committed to and just extend that like this. Many people have read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Win Friends and Influence People from the 1930s. And if you haven't, you should. It is it's still in print for a reason you know some of it comes across as pretty dated but the principles are still there. However, there's one principle that has been badly misunderstood. I would say systemically misunderstood, and that is the idea that people buy from people they like. This is true, but the truer expression of the principle would be people don't buy from people, they don't like. If they actively dislike you, they're not going to buy it from you. They're not going to give you a guess. However, they don't have to be your friend to give you a gift and misunderstanding. This has led to almost 100 years of salespeople being way too ingratiating and fake in trying to get people to like them, thinking that's what's going to get people to buy. And of course, being fake makes people not like you totally backfire personally. So you don't need to be everyone's friend. You just need to make sure you're not actually dislike good enough. Now, one important principle to having that sort of like you must be this tall, bare minimum amount of liking, which is not being disliked. As soon as you're over that bar, you're in the clear. Familiarity breeds liking. This is one of the reasons that even a bad ad campaign with enough money behind it will become successful because you can get those billboards everywhere and saturate the airwaves. People get to know the idea well enough that they start to accept it and then adopt it. You also see this with successful politicians who find one message and just hammer that message over and over and over again. No matter which side of the aisle you're on. There are examples that you can refer to back in the nineties. Bill Clinton's it's the economy. George W Bush was brilliant at this. That guy could stay on message like he was velcroed to it. And having that one message repeated over and over and over again makes it more familiar, which makes you like it. This is why branding is so important, because the thing you can think of most easily the top of the category will outsell second place by one and a half to two X. And so this is where a clear focused brand really comes in because it makes things feel more familiar, more liked, thus more likely to buy. And in interpersonal level, the best way to be liked is to like people, enjoy them, be curious about them, see what they have to offer, and they will. And the principle of reciprocity then kicks in and they start to like, you authority. This principle of influence is sort of related to social proof, except in a little more intense way in that we trust the sources of authority to make decisions for us. However, that is really complicated. In 2021, in a global economy, first of all, faith in institutional authority is at a 100 year low. It's not a thousand years. About people trust their neighbor more than they trust a an expert who has multiple PhDs in a given topic. People of different age groups trust different theories. People of different national backgrounds have very different relationships to authority. We've done some work in Asia and the sources of authority that are trusted in China versus South Korea versus Japan and Malaysia, all wildly, wildly different. You really have to know your prospect well to know what authority they trust, whether that's going to be strangers, peer reviews, institutional authority, you know, sort of established provincial authority, children, you know. So sometimes it is the the raw reaction of a child that has no agenda, that has the most authoritative weight, and then the last principle of of influence ownership is that of scarcity. People want what they can't have. If you're not familiar with sneakers, this is one of a pair that will sell for a thousand 1500 dollars very rare sneakers. Now, are they ten times better than running shoes you might buy for a bucks? No, but the scarcity makes you want them. Now, you want to be authentic about what's scarce, but you also have some leeway in this because of the shared expectations we have about how commerce works in the modern day. And that is like, Here's an offer. It's only good today. Okay, You might know that the company could make the same offer tomorrow, but they've only made it today and that scarcity makes you more inclined to buy. And those are the principles of influence. And I am at a moment from Russell and Spark that was a lot packed into a short amount of time. And if you have questions, I encourage you to email me at the bottom you'll see Adam dot all at Russell and Sparks. Tom by all means, send me your questions, your thoughts if you need something off me, we're happy to help and good luck. Thank you so much, Adam. This concludes the webinar. Today's presentation is Copyright 2021 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. With all rights reserved. And the content of this presentation is Copyright 2021 by Russell and Spark, where additional case on demand webinars Please visit. W w w dot case dot org slash on demand. Thank you.

Drive Donations with Expert Empathy

Adam Olenn

Russell and Spark

emotions

engagement

donations

storytelling

emotional connection

six principles of influence