5 power fundraising techniques rooted in science

Dani Cluff: Perfect. We’ll give it just a minute as everyone gets logged in today.

Good morning or afternoon for some of us now. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna drop your name and where you’re coming in from today, we’re super excited to have everyone with us. For my southeastern friends, I hope you guys are bundled up for the weekend. I hear you have some pretty nasty snow coming your way, so I hope everyone stays safe.

Oh, so our Tennessee friends, I heard you guys might have a rough weekend. I hope it goes well. For any of my fellow Minnesotans who might be on the call, I just looked at the weather, and the high tomorrow is supposed to be negative nine, so I hope everyone is just staying inside and not going anywhere.

We’re so excited today to have Sean Kosofsky joining us, the nonprofit fixer himself. He’s gonna be sharing some power fundraising techniques to help us all boost our fundraising for 2026. I hope everyone’s year is off to a great start. As we go through, I’ll just run through a few housekeeping notes before we get started. We are recording today’s webinar, so you’ll be getting an email later this afternoon with a link to the recording and any resources that we might share in today’s webinar. If you have any questions or you need anything following up from the webinar, you can always respond to webinars@reply.bloomerang.com.

And if you have any questions as we’re going through, please use that little Q&A area in Zoom. You can also put those questions in the chat, but it’ll be easier for us to track them if they’re in that Q&A spot.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Bloomerang, we are a giving platform built for purpose, created to help nonprofits build stronger relationships and grow their impact. Our tools like donor and volunteer management, online fundraising, peer-to-peer campaigns, and custom donation forms are designed to help organizations of all sizes thrive. We believe that when fundraisers have the time and insights they need, they can focus on what truly matters, making a difference in your communities. If this resonates with you, we’ll be launching a poll at the end of the webinar where you’ll be able to opt in to connect with Sean himself, or you can learn more about Bloomerang there.

And as I mentioned, we’ve got the wonderful Sean Kosofsky today, a longtime friend of Bloomerang. We’re super excited to have Sean with us to share all of the expertise that he brings to the table. I know he has a lot of great information to share, so I’m gonna hand things over so he can get things started for us.

Sean Kosofsky: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. I will share my deck now. Let’s see here. Here we go. Alright.

Everyone should see a black bar at the bottom of their screen with captions for me talking in white. That’ll be good for the recording, if there’s a recording, and then also just for everyone who wants to follow along.

My name is Sean Kosofsky. I live in New York City, but I originally hail from Detroit. I will always shout out Detroit, my hometown. I love Detroit.

I have been in the nonprofit sector for a long time, about thirty-four years. I got started when I was sixteen. I’ll be fifty in March. I’m so excited to turn fifty.

And I’m excited to do today’s presentation. I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to social science research and academic and proven studies about what works and what doesn’t work. This will not be a science-y talk, but it will be stuff that’s rooted in what we know works to get people to give.

So, thirty-four years in fundraising, thirty-four years in nonprofits, five stints as an executive director, working on a wide range of issues: LGBT issues, women’s reproductive health, bullying prevention, climate change. Just working on a wide range of issues. I’ve done work on 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, political action committees, ballot measures, candidates, just a wide, wide range of issues, and I love fundraising. A total nerd. Here are just some of my clients that I’ve worked with in the past couple of years and growing, in case you recognize any of these organizations.

And so what we’re gonna cover today: five. I’m actually gonna give you seven or eight. When I was putting the deck together, I’m like, I’m just gonna give it all away. So we’re gonna do about seven or eight social science–based practices today, and they’re all gonna relate to fundraising somehow. And I’m gonna share a tool with you, so stay tuned for that, and show you some tools and examples to deepen your learning.

So first, I wanna lead off with this idea that people are not logical. We are psychological. I’m gonna say that again because we all tend to think we’re approaching problems logically, but the truth is almost all of us are impacted each day by biases and quirks and varying motivations.

We see an image, and it makes us think of another image, whether we consciously know that’s happening or not, like heuristics, metaphors. Things influence us whether we acknowledge them or not, and these influences, these biases in human decision making, are creeping up all over the place. Only after you know them and name them can you be more aware of them. For example, recency bias. We’re more likely to make decisions based on something we just saw. Or availability bias, thinking that things are true because that’s what we’ve seen or we’ve been near. And, of course, there are other biases that creep into our decision making. So we all use shortcuts and heuristics, which is just a term for a psychological shortcut. We think of this, and it makes us think of another thing.

People want to be liked. That’s another thing about human psychology: we are rooted in a system of not wanting tension. We will do things to resolve tension. So if there’s information coming at me that I disagree with, I will try to resolve that tension by making it go away, ignoring it, or rationalizing it. There are all these different things that we do, whether we acknowledge it or not. But humans are psychological, not logical.

And this last bullet here, the most powerful force, I think, is cognitive dissonance, which I just sort of hinted at. Cognitive dissonance is that we don’t like information we disagree with. If someone says something good about Trump or bad about Trump or good about Obama or bad about Obama, depending on where you stand politically, you’re more likely to rationalize a set of decisions based on your own personal or political views. And if you like someone, they could knock your meal over in your lap, and you would find some way to rationalize why they’re a good person. But if a stranger, if you just don’t like them, the way they hold their fork is gonna upset you. So when we know that we have this sort of thing going on in us, it helps us ease into this conversation today, knowing that we are all basically operating with some psychological, or lack of logical, approach to lots of things, and that’s okay.

So biases and motivations creep up everywhere. One of the things I’ll share is that we like to affirm our own self-identity. People don’t like feeling bad.

So if I say, “Oh, this set of things is racist,” a person will say, “Oh my god. I’m not racist, because racists are bad people. So I can’t possibly be racist. So, therefore, the thing I said or the person I voted for can’t possibly be racist.” That’s how you see people rationalizing opinions and pursuits.

This relates to nonprofit fundraising in the following way. I used to run a climate change think tank that specialized in social science research. And one of the things we learned is that telling people they have a carbon footprint, like, “What’s your carbon footprint?” makes people feel bad. “Oh my god. You’re telling me that I’m polluting. I’m not a bad person. I don’t wanna be reminded that I’m polluting. I’m actually a good person, and I recycle, and therefore, I can’t possibly have a carbon footprint.” And I’m still gonna fly on that plane. Right? People don’t like hearing information that makes them feel guilty. They will tune it out. So try to use different language.

One of the things we learned, and you’ll hear this throughout, is about group identity. People like to feel good about themselves. So remind people that they’re good. For example, “People like you who vote,” “citizens like you who care about their community.” Saying things like that helps prime a donor or prime someone for action. Your name matters. “If we could get you as one of the fifty donors for this new community center, it’s gonna attract other people, because you matter. You attract other people in this community. You’re a big deal.”

Peer pressure also matters. We are more likely to give when we think other people will notice. And when we notice other people giving, we give. Imagine a gala where someone offers up five hundred dollars. It’s pretty contagious. That person loves being seen in the room as giving money. Even if it’s not ego, it’s kinda like, I want you all to see that I’m taking a stand. I’m actually acting right now. And then when I see someone giving, it makes me feel like I should. Peer pressure is really, really powerful, and it actually impacts so much of our human behavior. This relates to fundraising because you want people to feel like they’re part of something bigger. “We need ten donors to help build the shelter. We already have nine. Will you be the tenth?” That kind of messaging lets someone feel like, oh, I’m completing a story. I’m actually part of something bigger than me. That’s amazing.

And then there’s this term efficacy, and efficacy means, do my actions matter? If I vote, does it matter? If I take action and sign a petition, does it do something? Do my actions actually matter? Do I turn inward and just protect my family, or do I turn outward and actually engage with the larger world? Do I believe my actions matter? Efficacy. We wanna make sure our donors believe their actions matter.

Take “every vote matters.” There is some research to say that if I were to call a bunch of voters and say, “Oh, turnout is gonna be down. It’s gonna be low, so your vote matters more than ever,” you’d think that’s pretty logical. Your vote will matter more because there are fewer voters going out. It doesn’t work. The thing that actually works is peer pressure. “There are gonna be tons of people showing up to the polls this winter, and your vote matters even more because it’s gonna be the highest-turnout election ever.” Telling people that all their neighbors are doing something makes people act more than the logical argument that your vote matters more in a small turnout. So, consistently, the research shows that peer pressure matters.

And saying things like “seventy-five dollars buys a meal for someone for a week,” tying your donation to a specific unit of program delivery, makes someone feel like they’re tied to something bigger. They’re actually solving a problem. They want to feel good about themselves. So you point out how their gift is directly related to impact. One of the biggest reasons why people give money is ego. And when I say ego, I mean that they wanna feel good, not that they need their name on a building or something.

And, Dani, just to time check, I have a whole hour. Right?

Dani Cluff: Yes. We’ll leave a few minutes for Q&A, but, yeah, you’re good to talk about.

Sean Kosofsky: Perfect. Just wanna make sure. I’ve done some where I only have thirty minutes, and I wanna make sure I’m not working at the wrong pace.

So people really like to feel good about themselves, and that really matters. Group identity, we’re gonna keep talking about this throughout the whole presentation. “People like you who vote.” “People like you who care about their community.” This is gonna be peppered throughout the whole presentation today.

Another thing is that people give to people. I don’t go to Kellogg Foundation and ask for money from Kellogg Foundation. I’m asking for money from Sally. Sally is at Kellogg. Humans give to humans. So when you understand that every request you put out for money is gonna be read by, consumed by, digested by, and decided by a human, you know that you’re actually dealing with human psychology here. There’s no bot or machine deciding my grant. It’s a human. So when you’re writing, when you’re pitching, when you’re explaining, when you’re making the case for fundraising, you’re talking to a human, and humans are impacted by psychology. They’re impacted by persuasion. They’re impacted by science.

Canvassers: I used to be a door-to-door canvasser when I was eighteen. I did pretty good at it. I was getting double quota at the door every night. I learned some things about how to get strangers to part with their cash on a porch. One of the things we would do, of course, was put a clipboard in their hand. “Hi. I’m Sean. I’m on your porch, and I’m doing work for clean water. Can you see this clipboard here? Can you see this petition?” If I can get that door open and that clipboard in their hand, they are far more likely to give money. And then I ask them to sign, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll sign a petition. Doesn’t cost me any money. Great.” And then I would say, “Oh, thank you so much. That really does help us. But if you can back up that signature with a gift, that would really help us today.” So that natural progression of getting the screen door open, getting a clipboard in their hand, getting them to take the pen, getting them to sign, and then the natural next step is to back it up, because the kind of person they are is to deepen their commitment. I’ve qualified them by getting them to sign, and then later on, I get them to give. This is how fundraising works.

Psychology. We know that human psychology can change how someone hears something and how it resonates with them and what they will do afterward. For example, if I use the term sea level rise with a more conservative voter, they’re gonna tune me out. “Oh, you’re a flaming, tree-hugging liberal.” But if I use the word flooding, I’m far more likely to get through. We’ve tested this in Florida, where lots of people are around water and own homes near water. If you talk about flooding, they instantly understand what you’re talking about, but the term sea level rise is charged now. Climate change versus clean energy. These words matter. So framing, priming, these different concepts from social science research, they matter.

The messenger matters. If I believe the messenger has trust, charisma, and knowledge, I’m going to absolutely follow them almost off a cliff with whatever they tell me. So if you’re sending out pieces of mail or emails and you take, let’s say, a very prominent and popular politician in your area and have them send out an email with you or for you, “this is from state representative Sanders” or something like that, you’re more likely to get some resonance, because people are likely to trust certain messages over other ones or ones they don’t know.

People value meaning more than facts. This is gonna hurt some people’s brains. Humans don’t act logically. They don’t trust facts. They don’t look for things that are factual. They look for information that gives them meaning. If I see a GIF on the Internet of Joe Biden tripping, it doesn’t matter if he tripped or not. I’m more likely as a voter to share it with people. “Here’s Joe tripping. He’s old.” This is how this stuff spreads on the Internet. No one cares whether Joe tripping was real. They care that it just seems real. It makes sense to them. It gives them meaning. This feels like it’s probably true. When you understand that about human psychology and human motivation for sharing information, you understand that giving people meaning matters. I’m not saying lie to people. I’m saying don’t focus on facts as much as you focus on stories. Don’t focus on truth and facts as much as you focus on things that give people meaning.

The deficit model is something where we believe, oh, if we just give people more information, they’ll make smarter choices. Does anyone here think that’s true? Does anyone here think that if you just give people more information, they’ll make smarter choices? Give me a plus sign if you think that’s true or a minus sign if you think that’s false.

So this is a critical, critical thing for people to understand. The deficit model of learning assumes that if we just give people more information... no. You have to persuade. You have to use psychology. You have to find a way to get people to care, and that means by giving them meaning.

Alright. People are more likely to give to someone familiar to them than to a stranger. This is why peer-to-peer giving matters also. If I get an email from headquarters, from Sierra Club, maybe there’s a two percent likelihood I’m gonna give. But if Dani on this call, who I know, forwards me that same email from this environmental organization that says, “Sean, this really matters to me. Can you give?” I’m ten times more likely I’m gonna give, because someone I know asked me. And that’s why peer-to-peer fundraising always, always works by having the messenger not be an e-blast, but instead be a person asking a person.

Social identity. There’s something called the social identity model of collective action. It’s very science-y. Ignore it. Basically, what it means is when you tap into people’s group identity, you’re more likely to get them to act. People like us, like the whole “Don’t mess with Texas” ad campaign. We’re Texas. We’re strong. We’re beautiful. We don’t litter here. Hugely popular campaign. “We vegans know what it takes to be healthy.” “Others on the board are on board with this campaign. Are you?” A little bit of peer pressure. “People like you always vote because we believe in you, you believe in democracy.” These are the kinds of things you wanna say before asking for money or asking for some call to action.

So the first tactical tip I wanna give you, even though I’ve been peppering you with some high-level psychology there, is benefits versus features.

Very often, in order for us to break through in this noisy world of messaging, we have to talk differently. Every single human being we are talking to, with our website, our emails, on the stage at the gala, is filtering every message, because they could be grabbing for their phone in a second to just look at the news. Everyone is thinking, what’s in it for me? So what? Why do I care? So one of the big things we need to do to break through all the noise, as a nonprofit or anyone trying to get press or media or communicate through their advertising, is answer: why me, why you should care, and why now? Essentially, your case for support, your case statement, anything involving your pitch, you have to break through with basically why you should care, why us, why it matters that we’re involved, and then why now, why you should act now.

Every subject line, every pitch, every opening at the microphone, whenever you’re pitching newsrooms, you need to be thinking, what is in this for the reader? Why should they care? And that means we can’t just keep listing for people the things we do. “Hey. Look at all the great stuff we do.” They’re gonna be like, “Well, I don’t care. Tell me how that matters to me.” And that’s the difference between features versus benefits language.

One way to do this is to say you. In a lot of your writing and fundraising: “You helped us get to this goal.” You, people like you, donors like you. Saying you, you, you to your donors brings them into the story.

Now the benefits versus features language, which I’ll explain right now. A lot of us are listing features. “Here are the five programs we have in our nonprofit.” No one cares about the name of your program. What they care about is the work you do, the results you get, the benefits that you deliver.

Here’s an example in this little graphic down here on the right-hand side, of a law firm’s website. A law firm website could say, “We do car accidents. We do truck accidents. We do motorcycle accidents.” Okay. Great. So you’re just listing to me the kind of law you do. A better messaging technique would be, “We help make you whole after an accident.” Or instead of saying “we handle divorces,” you could say, “We help you navigate the toughest heartbreak of your life so you end up good on the other side.”

Does that make sense? Give me a plus sign in the chat if you understand the difference between listing a feature and giving a benefit.

Alright. Perfect. So nonprofits do this all the time. Businesses do this. Nonprofits do this. “We have a shelter. We have a literacy program.” You’re just kinda listing features, and that is never gonna be as effective as listing benefits. So always think about benefits.

If I hold up a pencil, one of these kinds of pencils, and I say, “My pencil has six sides to it,” that’s a feature. If I say, “This pencil won’t roll off your desk,” that’s a benefit. Does that make sense? Give me a plus sign if that makes sense for you, the difference between listing a feature and a benefit.

Alright. Next slide here, going deeper on this concept. Don’t list what you do. Tell people what problem you solve and why it matters. This little chart here shows you an example. For headphones, the feature is that they’re wireless. The benefit is no more tangled cords. For a meal kit, it arrives ready to heat, but the benefit is that it saves time preparing meals. For an air fryer, the feature is a removable basket. The actual benefit is that it’s easier to clean after using. And so on and so on.

This is how we do benefits versus features in all of our fundraising, in all of our communications. I bet all of you could go print up a page from your website right now and find where you’re using features language instead of benefits language. A trick to turn your features language into benefits language, anytime you’re using features language, is to say “so that you can.” So if I say, “We have a homeless shelter so that you can stay dry and warm in your hour of need.” “We have a literacy program so you can ace any job interview with confidence.” So anytime you think you’re using a feature, you can convert it to a benefit by using “so that you can,” “so that you,” or “so what.” “Our nonprofit has a community center” now becomes “our nonprofit has a community center so you can have free access to the Internet, so you can land that job.”

To uncover benefits, you say “so that you can,” in order to show people how they will be better at, or better off, or how they will be transformed by something. Nonprofits and businesses should see higher engagement, higher enrollment, more sign-ups, and more conversions if you do the benefits-versus-features thing consistently.

So, normally, I’d say we have time for practice, but I know my deck is too long. So here is where I would have everyone just put something in the chat. At some point during the training today, I want you to think about a feature that you’re listing, or a program that you’re listing, even if it’s in your business or your nonprofit. And just for the heck of it, anytime during our training, put “benefit versus feature.” I wanna see how you’re converting one of your features to a benefit. Alright? Do that in the chat.

Here is a link that I’m gonna give all of you. Actually, I’m gonna keep sharing my screen here. Where’s my chat? There’s my chat. In the chat right now, you can see I’m gonna share it twice. This is a link to a rooted-in-research handout I have called the board fundraising worksheet.

This document is my most popular tool that I give away throughout the year. It works. It is based on the idea that board members won’t fundraise if you just say, “Hey, everyone, I need you to fundraise.” They’re not gonna do it. If you give them an actual prewritten menu of things, they’re more likely to choose from it. And then you ask your board members to fill in this board fundraising worksheet in front of their peers, in front of the rest of the board, live, and they all have to turn it in to the chair or the executive director during the meeting. Take fifteen minutes during a board meeting, distribute this board fundraising worksheet. Everyone has a list of things they can do. They choose three of them, and they turn it in in front of everyone. Several things are happening there: peer pressure, and plan writing makes you more effective at hitting your goals. This tool is powerful, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s my most popular tool. So that’s just a little gift for all of you to go download the board fundraising worksheet. It’s a powerful, effective tool rooted in social research.

Next, we’re gonna talk about the knowledge gap. You’ve all seen this before. Some people call it clickbait, but knowledge gap is actually bigger than that. We tend to give people facts first, but one of the best ways to grab people’s attention is to ask a question or create a knowledge loop, a knowledge gap, and then close the gap. Our brains hate not knowing the end of a story. Give me a plus sign in the chat if you’ve ever heard half of a phone conversation going on. “What? Sally did what? Oh my god.” You’ve ever heard that, and it has just fried your brain. It’s so distracting. You can’t even finish doing what you’re doing, because all you can hear is half of a conversation. Your brain wants to finish the story. Because your brain wants to finish the story, you are distracted by this thing that’s happening. Our brains love to close the loop. And not knowing the end of a joke or a punch line, like someone’s saying, “Oh, so what did the blah blah blah say to the blah blah blah?” and not knowing it will leave you unsettled for ten minutes if someone then just walks out of the room. Our brains are wired to finish stories. So the knowledge gap is something we can use to entice people and get them to listen more to the things we’re sharing, instead of just spouting off facts and lists of programs and accomplishments and statistics.

Novelists and script writers know that curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close patterns. Alright? So how does this show up in the world?

Local news. “Could a new drug on the market be killing your children? Is it in your medicine cabinet? Stay tuned after these ads.” Of course you’re gonna stay tuned, because they’ve just opened up a knowledge gap, and now you need to close the gap. Or clickbait subject lines. “This one thing rattled Madonna on her first night on tour.” Of course you’re gonna open it if you care about Madonna, which I do.

Our pitches are not clickbait, but they do borrow a key tactic from the knowledge gap literature. And this means that you can ask a question. For example, when I was working on bullying prevention, I could say to someone, “We know that bullying is one hundred percent preventable. A hundred percent of people know what bullying is. A hundred percent of people know that they don’t like it, and yet a hundred percent of people have probably practiced it. But we also know bullying is a hundred percent preventable. Do you wanna know how?” And then people will follow me along. So there’s a different way of just giving stats versus inviting them in to close a knowledge gap.

Now tip three, human connection. Sometimes you call this slide “make magic.” You wanna conjure something awesome with your audience. You’re gonna use powerful quotes, concepts, sound bites, anecdotes. Don’t bury the lead. Every time you’re out fundraising, if you’ve ever said something and someone’s eyebrows went up, or they asked you lots of questions afterward because you said something that just blew their mind, or a statistic they’ve never heard, or something so shocking, these are the kinds of things you wanna lead with.

Make the audience feel good. We talked about the ego thing earlier in the psychology. People don’t wanna feel bad. They wanna feel good. Supporters wanna feel good. Also, impact. People definitely want to know that the organization is making a difference. Now, you don’t have to have proof that this dollar made this result happen or this win happened, but they wanna hear and understand impact. So be able to tell a great story of how you’re making progress. You have momentum. Even if you’re not winning, point to certain things you’re doing in the organization to show momentum, and that is impact. “We have the best team we’ve ever had before. We have the best board we’ve ever had. We have better data and more learning, and we’re learning faster than we’ve ever had.” Donors love to hear that.

Be reader-centered. Focus on what the reader is interested in hearing. Your subject line in any email has one job: to get them to open the email. And then the first sentence of that email is to get them to keep reading that email. But you’re gonna make a lot less money if no one ever opens your emails. So they will open your emails if your subject lines are awesome, and your subject lines can borrow from really profound statements using the knowledge gap and being a great storyteller.

Simplify complicated concepts. Has anyone here ever heard the expression “confusion kills conversion”? I guarantee it. The minute you’re on a website and you don’t know what to do next, you’re on some site, and if it’s a government site or some company, and there’s no clear button saying “Act now,” “Sign this,” “Do this.” If you were on a contract-signing website and there was no “Sign here,” the minute you get confused, you leave. You leave. Confusion kills conversion. If you’re on your mobile device, on a browser, trying to do something, we have other things we could be doing. The minute it’s complicated, we’re out of there. So your nonprofit cannot be saying things that are confusing. Your website cannot be confusing. Understanding that confusion kills conversion is really critical for the donor journey.

Your best language might also come from your stakeholders. What do I mean by that? There’s a software application that I use that was never designed for me to love this one tiny feature in it. It’s a software called Mixmax. It does fifty things, but there’s one little thing it does that I swear by, and I love it. It keeps me at inbox zero every day. They don’t even advertise that this is what it does. But my favorite thing they do, for $109 a year for this software, is that it helps me keep inbox zero. And any software application, any car, any company in the world that makes a product or a service, their users will tell them, “This is the thing I love about your product,” and it’s not necessarily what the company intended. So as nonprofits, we may think our homeless shelter or our community center is the best thing we did, but your users, your members, might actually come to you and say, “No. It’s the fact that it’s about fellowship and community. It’s the fact that I went somewhere that was warm. It’s the fact that I see the same people all the time when I’m at the community center. It’s not the computer lab you have. It’s actually this other thing.” So some of the best language we have for connecting with our donors is gonna come from our users. Every company, every nonprofit out there should be surveying your members about what they love about what you do, and the words are going to be gold. Listen to your clients and donors for what language they use. And if you don’t have it now, use it next year. Go track that stuff down.

Let’s see here. I think I actually have my numbers messed up. This might be number four.

So, social proof. Doctor Robert Cialdini, in the seventies, wrote this book and talked about social proof. If you’ve never heard the term social proof, it’s just little indicators that everyone else is doing something. It’s showing off that the thing you do works because other people like it. So testimonials are a good example of social proof. You can see all the visuals on this page here. Whenever you go to any site and there are, like, five stars, that’s social proof. Customer reviews at the bottom there. You can see Amazon does this. Every site does this. Trustpilot.

And then here at the bottom, you can see the six major types of social proof: from customers, by experts, referrals from friends, ratings and reviews, social media proof, certifications. At the bottom left, if you can get verified on Twitter, that’s a version of social proof. Having celebrities or newspapers talking about you, having a screenshot that a celebrity tagged you, having a headline from a paper that you were quoted in, that’s social proof. Case studies of things you’ve done that have worked, promoting content from your followers. These all work as social proof, and we don’t use enough of this.

On the bottom right here on this slide, how many of you have seen this? You go to any film festival, anywhere in the world, and you just see those little leaves. Give me a plus sign if you know what I’m talking about. You see those little leaves on both sides, and you know this film has racked up some awards. You don’t even need to read them. You just know this is a well-decorated film. So that is a form of social proof. And then if you’ve ever been on a website where, in the bottom left, these little bubbles pop up saying “fourteen people just purchased this.” On the bottom left here on this slide, “fifty thousand Elvis fans can’t be wrong,” like this Elvis impersonator costume is the best one. Look how many people have bought it. And then on the second to the left, one of the nonprofit clients I work with is using these badges to show that their nonprofit is legit. These are all forms of social proof, and they get you money. They get you followers. They get you action taking. This is social proof. The marketing world has learned that third-party validation is powerful. Charity ratings, telling individual stories, it builds authority regardless of solicitation.

So, again, my numbers are off. You’re actually gonna get, like, eight tips today, I think.

Optimism versus suffering. Optimism almost always is better than suffering. People have heard this term poverty porn, where we’ve been trained in the nonprofit world to say, “This is the problem in society. We have a solution for it. Give us money so we can solve it.” Sometimes showing people the problems in the world won’t activate all the people. It’ll activate some of the people. Sometimes you need hope, aspiration, optimism, not suffering. So we want to tap into efficacy. I mentioned this earlier in the training. Efficacy is the idea that my actions matter. If you keep telling me that the world sucks and the world is difficult and everything is going to hell, and the world is burning because of climate change, there will be people who just feel like that’s just too scary and too big, and I can’t act. But if you show optimism, if you show that solutions are working, it does unlock a whole other wave of optimism and a whole new universe of people willing to support you.

One of the things you’ll also want to do... sorry, there’s a red arrow here pointing to the right. I wanna point this out. I used to run this climate organization, and all we did was talk about why certain messages work and certain messages don’t, like polar bears versus some other message. Essentially, efficacy is really critical. We want people to believe that their actions matter so that you can unlock their action taking. The second bullet on this slide is make problems bite-size. If I talk about climate change, one of the things we’ve learned is that some people think climate change is so big of a problem that only governments can solve it. So me buying a hybrid vehicle, or not flushing too often, or brushing my teeth with water that’s running, that’s just not gonna make a difference. The problem is too big. So you make problems bite-size. “My kid’s asthma.” “Our neighborhood needs to get this park cleaned up.” When you make things bite-size versus global, people are more likely to be optimistic and actually see, oh, this is a bite-sized problem.

Reaffirming that work is hard. This is where I’m gonna get the most science-y of the entire talk. If you need someone to take action on something, tell them that it’s going to be hard. Don’t tell them that it’s going to be easy. So I want everyone to listen to me. If you’re distracted at this moment, listen to this. If my best friend Becky comes to me and says, “Sean, I’m thinking of having a New Year’s resolution. I’m gonna lose fifteen pounds,” and I say to her, “Oh, Becky, that’s gonna be easy for you. You’re such a strong person. That’ll be easy,” that’s actually deflating her. I’m actually making light of this really difficult thing. We all know losing weight is difficult. So instead, if I want behavior change, if I want to reinforce action taking and behavior change, I should say to Becky, “That’s actually really difficult. I’m really glad you’ve chosen to do that. You’re a strong person. I know you can take on this challenge.” So you legitimize their challenge.

We did research and found that if you ask fifty thousand people in an email, “Call your member of Congress. This is really easy,” people are like, “No. Actually, I’m terrified to call my member of Congress.” You say to them, with one extra sentence in your email, “I know this is going to be difficult, but I need you to call your member of Congress,” and there was a twenty-two percent higher likelihood that people actually called their member of Congress, simply by making the statement. “I know this is hard, but I need you to do this.” So legitimation rhetoric is what that’s called. Reaffirming for people that change is hard and that action taking is hard, but that you know that they can do it. So we know that peppering this into our messaging will work every single time.

And this is another sign. We did learn from climate change research that showing signs of protests actually turned some people off. But showing signs of solutions turned people on to action taking. Look, this is windmills. This is working. This is actually our country getting solutions. Here are people installing solar panels. Those images were more likely to get people to take an action, to volunteer, and to donate than showing protests and angry people where solutions were not happening.

Another tip is show, don’t tell. We’ve all heard this one before. Give me a plus sign in the chat if you’ve heard the term “show, don’t tell.” Whenever you want someone to do something, you need to show them a picture of it. You don’t just tell them. So visuals, screenshots, pictures. I used to run a bullying prevention foundation. We had Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick do a fundraiser for us, and I had them hold up our sign for Day One to stop bullying. It has extra power if I show people that people are upstanders and taking action on this. Jesse Tyler Ferguson from Modern Family, he’s an upstander. So I just grabbed some screenshots, so instead of telling people that Jesse Tyler Ferguson tweeted us, I show them that he did. And then here’s a picture of just a whole bunch of people on a Zoom call showing that they all showed up for something. Try to show visually your work or people responding to your work. Showing, not telling, is almost always better.

Hypotheticals of the work, projections, “this is what the world could look like if we succeed” in a picture, or influential people using your solutions, like we did with the celebrities here. You can use Canva. You can use photos. You can take screenshots. These were some pictures of people sending in stuff to us. On the right-hand side, charity: water had a picture from inside their annual report that I loved. “Donors gave generously all year, including a four-year-old who mailed us a letter and a one-dollar gift,” and then they show you the picture of the letter. That is gold. That is just gold. If I was a donor and someone put that thing in my hand, I’d be amazed. Also, making it tactile by touching the actual work. Get someone into your community center to walk around.

Storytelling. Even if you don’t have great visuals, take donors on a journey using narrative and characters and overcoming adversity. Put the donor in the story. Sometimes it’s easier to actually talk about them going on this journey versus just a client you served. Even using timelines to help create some of the journey, like this image down below. This is actually the timeline of our organization. It can show people the journey of the organization.

Here is an image of Oxfam showing visually the reach they have around the world. They’ve spanned out a global map and colored in green their reach. This tells me, oh my god, this organization is having impact all over the place. That’s a visual way to do this. Using an individual in a story. So showing the rubble after an accident or an earthquake, and, again, some people might call it poverty porn, but in this situation, they’re trying to illustrate the exact problem that’s happening. It’s far more visual this way, far more impactful this way. And then here’s an example of people finding solutions, sustainable food versus struggling or suffering.

One thing you all have at your disposal is Google Trends. How many people here have ever used Google Trends before? Give me a plus sign if you’ve ever used Google Trends. It’s totally free. Google Trends is a free website. You can go to Google Trends anytime and type in any search term to see what people are searching on the Internet. So when the Green New Deal, the climate bill, was introduced back in 2018, 2019, we hadn’t had climate legislation for, like, ten years, if you can believe it. And then the Green New Deal was introduced. I went to Google Trends and said, show me the Green New Deal. I can see right there that before December 2018, no one was googling it. No one knew what it was. And bam. Out of nowhere, December 2018, when the bill’s introduced, the whole world was talking about the Green New Deal. If I wanna talk to donors and funders about the Green New Deal, I’m gonna show them this graphic. If I wanted to talk about what’s happening with Greenland, who the heck was searching the word Greenland before? But I could go do a search right now on Google Trends and show no one cared about Greenland till now. So if you care about safety, security, or international relations, now is the time we’re talking about Greenland or Venezuela. You can search anything and then grab a visual and use that to talk about your issue, especially if your issue is in the national conversation. Always make things visual.

Almost done. Anchoring. Who here has ever heard of anchoring? Give me a plus sign if you’ve ever heard of anchoring. Not many people have heard of anchoring. Okay.

Anchoring is really, really powerful as a social science technique. My clients use this. I’ve used it to raise a lot of money. Anchoring centers the conversation around a focal point. How many of you have ever gone to a donation page where there are, like, four donation levels? Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, eighty. And so they circle the fifty. They circle the second one and say, “A donation at this level really helps us.” They’re anchoring. They’re trying to draw your attention to the solution they want. They know that by aiming you at that number, they’re more likely to get that number. That’s an example of anchoring.

Anchoring also happens in so many other ways. You’re basically dropping an anchor and taking a stand and trying to get the conversation to happen around one focal point where you want it. Let’s say you go to a used car lot, and there’s a five-thousand-dollar sticker on a car. That’s the anchor. Everyone’s gonna argue around the five-thousand-dollar number. If the lot had put six thousand, the anchor would be six thousand. And you’re gonna wanna try to get, “Oh my god. This car is crap. I’m gonna give you two thousand dollars for this.” You’re dropping an anchor at two thousand. You want the conversation to start around two. They want it to be around five, but you’re basically dropping an anchor.

So I had a funder come to me once and say, “Sean, if we were to give you thirty-five to fifty thousand dollars, what would you do?” Guess what I did? I dropped an anchor at the fifty number. “Well, for fifty thousand, we can do this.” And then I said it five times. “For fifty thousand, we could do this, and for fifty thousand, we can do this, and for fifty thousand, we could do this.” I got the fifty. I didn’t get forty-nine thousand. I didn’t get thirty-five thousand. I got fifty thousand. In four minutes, I got fifteen thousand extra dollars by using anchoring. Another donor came to me once: “We’re thinking of supporting your organization. Would twenty-five to forty matter? What would you do with a gift in that range?” I’m like, “Oh, well, for forty thousand, I can do this, this, this.” And, of course, I got the forty thousand.

One of my clients the other day, she just left a testimonial for me. She goes, “Oh my god. The anchoring thing totally worked. Someone hit me with a range, and I gave a number, and I got the number.” If someone offers you a job, let’s say you’re talking to someone about a job, and they say, “Oh, the position pays between a hundred and a hundred and ten,” you’re gonna say, “Well, I would take a hundred and ten. A hundred and ten is perfectly appropriate for my skill level.” You’ve dropped an anchor. Does that make sense? When people learn about anchoring, they’re like, oh my god, this is gonna work for me all the time. Give me a plus sign if the anchoring tip is useful for you, or if that’s clear.

Anchoring is very powerful. All these techniques cost you zero extra dollars and almost zero extra time. It’s just knowing human psychology.

Alright. Ben Franklin effect. I think there’s maybe one more after this one. So, the Ben Franklin effect is that you ask for a favor before you ask for the real favor. Sounds counterintuitive. If I’m gonna walk into this meeting with this donor for fifty thousand dollars, the last thing I wanna do is ask them for two things. But when any of us have a human interaction, there’s an unspoken human connection that’s happening there. So when someone opens up a door for you, you don’t like the fact that they just opened up a door for you. It creates tension, that reciprocity. So the next door, the second door, you’re gonna hold that for them. So you eliminate the reciprocity. We tend to not like to be in debt to someone at all. However, at the same time, we like doing things for people.

So if I walk into a donor meeting, I might say, “Oh, hi, Jane. I’m so glad to be talking with you today. Oh my god. I love this painting up on your wall. Who is the artist? Can you send me the name of this artist?” It’s the tiniest little favor. I’m not asking for a big favor. “Can you send me the name of this artist?” “Oh, I’ll totally send you the name of the artist. He’s beautiful. This art is great.” What’s just happened in that moment is we have formed a bond. I have primed you. I have warmed you up for the big ask. We’ve shown some vulnerability. We’ve made this human rapport and connection. So by asking for the tiny thing, I’m teeing you up for the real thing. So if they offer to pay for coffee, say yes, because that little gift is gonna turn into a bigger gift in a minute.

Any additional opportunity to express gratitude is also gonna bond you. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for that. You’re such a great person.” Even if they don’t give today, you have created a bond for the future, whether they understand it or not. You might even ask a donor at the end of a meeting to make three introductions for you. That’s another way of asking for a little favor, but the big favor is the gift. But this is all directly related to rapport. So an example, as I gave, is asking for something small before you ask for something big. This is written about and known about, the Ben Franklin effect, that this actually works.

Finally, the last tip of the day. The book Made to Stick. I’m not gonna go into a lot of points here, but the book Made to Stick, from decades ago, is all about why certain ideas are sticky in our culture. Basically, what they found after tons and tons of research is that messages tend to stick, they tend to last, they tend to resonate when they are simple, no jargon. When they are unexpected, I usually use the term “you had me at hello,” something like the “make magic” slide earlier, where you’re saying something pretty shocking and interesting at the very top. Make it concrete. Don’t make it abstract. You see these websites that are like, “What do you do?” “We create opportunities for people.” What does that even mean? These companies and websites that don’t even really tell you exactly what it is that they’re doing. Be concrete. “We put homeless people in shelters.” Be very, very clear.

Credible. You want your message to be credible. It’s believable. You want it to be emotional, tied to actual humans and human welfare, and stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. So that’s pretty much it for the training today. I will ditch the slides, and now, come on. Any questions that folks have in our last ten minutes? I will also monitor the chat.

Dani Cluff: There we go. We do have one question. Before I launch into that, I’m gonna launch a quick poll for everyone to fill out as we go into Q&A.

Somebody asked, how do science-based fundraising techniques account for donor fatigue over time, not just immediate giving behavior?

Sean Kosofsky: How do they account for donor fatigue? I don’t really know how to answer a question about how they account for donor fatigue. I think donor fatigue sometimes happens when you’re asking too much, or too much in a short period of time. People experience donor fatigue after an election. Too many asks too often. Everyone wants a five-dollar pitch, and you’re gonna get donor fatigue. If your fundraising is unsustainable, if you’re in a campaign-type environment all year round, you’re gonna fatigue your donors. There needs to be a window of time where you’re not asking. I think you should be asking all throughout the year, but it can’t be all on campaign level all the time. Social science research does imply that you should be touching your donor three or four times for every one time you’re asking for money. They don’t wanna just feel like an ATM.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely.

And we got another question that just came in. How can you balance all of this and grabbing an audience’s attention as a nonprofit law center that needs to be formal and relies heavily on jargon, technical language, and complex work?

Sean Kosofsky: You don’t need to be formal. We’ve been told that there’s a conservative way to do things, that we need to do things a certain way. You can still be bold. Here’s an example. When I do fundraising for LGBTQ issues, here’s my opening line: “Being gay has always been easy for me, but the closet almost killed me.” That’s still a conservative statement, but I’ve got your attention now. “It was the experience of suffering in the closet during my teen years, where I wanted to end my life, run away. I thought I was gonna go to hell. It wasn’t till I came out that my world just improved. Being gay has actually been easy. The closet has almost killed me.” I call that the “you had me at hello” statement, that bold knowledge gap, bold statement.

When I was working on climate change, one of the things we would say was, “The climate science is settled. We know humans are causing climate change. Now we have to look to social science research to figure out how to get people to care and get off the couch and act.” That is a great opening line. It doesn’t need to be shocking. It doesn’t need to be clickbait, but you do need to workshop your pitches. And the minute you’ve said something where someone’s like, “Whoa,” that’s amazing. Like, on the bullying front, I would say, “People behave in traffic in ways they would never on foot, and we behave at our keyboard in ways we would never face to face. We’re not our best selves online. There’s a word for this. But we can prevent online harassment and revenge porn and bullying, and there’s a way to do it. Would you like to learn more?” But that opening line has to be gotcha. It doesn’t have to be controversial. It just has to be bold.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. Okay. Another question rolling in. I think everything you’re saying is just sparking more. How can we access the tool that you gave to use for board opportunities for fundraising?

Sean Kosofsky: That tool I gave everyone, I would literally print it up. If you have in-person board meetings, I would distribute it to the whole board and say, “Okay. It’s January. Let’s do this. Everyone here has to raise a thousand dollars this year, whether it’s advised or required. And I want you all to pitch in. It helps all of our morale to see everyone else fundraising. So today, we’re gonna do this. Instead of asking you all to figure out how you’re gonna fundraise, giving you a menu is gonna make it far more practical. I would like us all to spend the next fifteen minutes to look at this two-page document with the fifteen options that are on it, and I want everyone here to pick three. Steve, you can pick, I wanna run a Facebook fundraiser. I’m gonna invite ten friends to give fifty dollars, and I’m gonna do a house party. Mary, you can do this, this, and this. But I want you all to fill in three today. It can change throughout the year, but taking a stand, making a commitment here in front of your peers that you’re gonna play some role in fundraising is going to get us in motion.” And the energy is palpable, and you all have to hand it in today in front of your peers. And you don’t police people on how much they personally give, but you do hold up the fact that you all promised to raise. That is how the document is used.

Dani Cluff: I love that. You guys just saw a question come through in the chat. Somebody shared they are looking to raise about twenty-five million, but the primary value we deliver will, due to... oh, sorry. My chat just disappeared.

Sean Kosofsky: Every value we deliver will be... due to a small number of people building PA’s first neuro-inclusive community, other than promising to build more. How can we make value seem more broad?

So the way you talk about the impact you’re having on the world doesn’t have to be on the number of people. It needs to be about transformation. The world will be different in this way when we’re done. So, for example, I ran a ballot measure on gay marriage in 2012 in North Carolina. We knew we were gonna lose. They put the ballot measure on the Republican presidential primary day. The only voters showing up were conservative, and we’re running a gay marriage ballot measure. So we knew we were gonna lose, but instead we said, we’re gonna lose forward. We’re gonna end this campaign with five hundred thousand dollars in the bank. We’re gonna end it with two thousand new identified volunteers and two million voters on the voter file identified as whether they’re with us or against us. So how can you point out all of the different assets that are gonna be created by your campaign? It is your money that is gonna get maybe fifteen hundred people served or fifty people served, but it’s gonna create deeper relationships than we’ve ever had. It’s gonna create momentum. More people will know about us than ever before. We’ll have convening authority. Because we raised this much money, we can call any meeting and everyone shows. That’s convening authority.

There’s a document I have called... I’m gonna share it with everyone before you all leave. There’s a blog post I created called the eighteen metrics that we’re not using but should be, and it is eighteen different ways to tell people that you’re kicking butt without having to measure anything. Hold on. Of course. I’m gonna try to use the search. Sorry. Eighteen. Here it is. Eighteen creative ways to measure your effectiveness. It’s actually a lead magnet. I thought the blog post was gonna come up, so I apologize. But here it is. On this list of eighteen things, you can tell people, we’re smarter than we were before. We have a better team than we’ve ever had before. We have a better board than we’ve ever had before. We’re learning faster than we’ve ever learned before. Donors respond to momentum even more than impact, even more than proof, even more than metrics. If you take nothing away from today’s talk, it is that optimism, that aspirational thing. Investors will give money to startups all the time who have no proof, no impact, no anything. It’s on the hope that they’re gonna change or disrupt an industry or start a great thing. People throw money at projects all the time on the hope that change will get better in the future. So the single overarching powerful thing about messaging when fundraising is momentum. Convince the donor that winning is on your side. Even if your budget got smaller this year, you’re getting better, leaner, smarter, faster, more agile. Donors will just open up their wallets for momentum. Tell the story of momentum, not the number of people you served. Momentum.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely.

Sean Kosofsky: It’s contagious.

Dani Cluff: I love it. Your joy in explaining this and your enthusiasm is contagious. I feel like I should go out and just accomplish everything I’ve ever wanted to.

Sean Kosofsky: Let's go start a campaign.

Dani Cluff: Well, I think we have all of the questions that have been sent in at the moment. So if there’s nothing else that anyone has, give everyone three minutes back in their day. But I just wanna, first of all, thank you everyone for joining us today. I know it’s a busy time of year for a lot of people, so we really appreciate you taking the time to join us live. And, Sean, thank you so much for putting all of that together. I can clearly see the joy in the research from you, so I don’t think it was too much of a hardship to come present for us, but we love every time that you come and join us.

Sean Kosofsky: I am a nerd. I love this stuff. Come find me.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. If there’s nothing else, thank you, everyone. I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day and the rest of your week.

Sean Kosofsky: Thanks, everyone.

Dani Cluff: Bye.

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