A ten-week series on things you should know about fundraising.
Numbers numb; stories stimulate.
The human mind is pre-set to tune out numbers (especially large ones) and to pay attention to stories.
If your fundraising is built around statistics — like the number of people living poverty, or the number of people diagnosed with a disease — you are actively priming people to ignore your message. Or argue with it — and you will lose the argument.
Stalin is believed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Unfortunately, he was right.
That’s why fundraising is built on stories. Vivid word-pictures of people.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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