Mallory: Welcome everyone, I am so excited to be here today with Ayelet Fishbach and I was really excited to invite you onto the show today because I had Dr. Ethan Cross on the show. He kicked off season one with us, and then he recommended your new book. Get it Done. So I’m excited to be talking about all the different components of motivation today.

And then also just learned about your incredible research and work in fundraising, specifically. Let’s have you just give us a little bit of background and bio around. What brought you ultimately to the book and what brings you to the conversation today?

Ayelet: I am a motivation scientist and I’ve been doing it for many years.

I’ve been interested in that work that gets people to study, to save, to eat healthily, to exercise and also to support social causes as they walk with other people. And just a couple of years ago, I realized that my knowledge is, it becomes too messy for me. Like I really need to organize what we know in motivation science.

And so I decided to just take all this amazing knowledge that we developed as a field and organize it. And I found out that they can put all the strategies that we have studied into four backups. And this is the framework that I’m offering for motivating yourself. And also those around you.

Mallory: Amazing. And I love that.

We’re going to get to talk about motivation, both from the donor perspective, what motivates donors to give and their level and engagement in giving. And also what motivates fundraisers to do the fundraising work, or stay motivated to do the fundraising work. But why don’t you start by just telling us what those four buckets are. And then I know there are a few of them that we’re going to dig particularly deep into. 

Ayelet: Yes, so the first thing is setting a goal. Okay, you want to define the goal such that it feels good. It’s not a chore. It’s really the destination. It’s something that exciting for you. You want to put the number of things that really helps goal setting. 

The second bucket, it’s sustaining motivation is you’re going from here to there. How should you monitor progress? When should you look back? Are you at that at the 20% half full or the 80% half empty. And when we looked at donations, we often intuitively will present that in terms that we give others and ourselves that the feedback and I’m asking what kind of feedback is the most motivating.

We never just want one thing. When do people decide to prioritize, when they decide to put all these goals together and find the right compromise. How people engage with self-control conflicts, which are goal conflicts. 

And then the final fourth packet is leveraging social support. And this is really where we did a lot of work on fundraising because if a goal is important, you do it with other people. You have other people working with you, also for your individual goals you have other people helping. But specifically in the context of fundraising, it is a goal that we are present with other people. Which is one reason why I was excited to talk to you today.

Mallory: Okay. So maybe we actually start there and go backwards a little bit, because I think what’s really interesting about what you’re saying or that you’re inspiring me to think about for the first time, is perhaps, even the relation between the first bucket that you said around clarity around the goal and collectively working towards a goal. So I think about nonprofits and the role that they play in verbalizing or storytelling around a shared goal and how to identify donors that share a goal with them.

So can you talk to us a little bit about that? How should organizations think about their clarity of goal in relationship then to the collective pursuing of that goal?

Ayelet: So you should think about your goal in terms of who is benefiting. How much should you do? Okay. What is that? The specific number that you’re trying to reach by a specific time, it could be the number of signatures or that the amount money, and you should know what you are trying to get, very clear goal.

Now you should realize that this is not a one person’s goal. So this is not anything like your goal to want to do the healthy foods or add to complete a college degree, because this is something that you’re doing with other people. And when we think about the other people, it could be a group of potential donors that walk together to make this happen.

It could also be that the group of the people that are helping and the people that are being helped, then how well do they work together? How much they see themselves as part of a group? One of the things that we found is that how much potential donors identify, either with other potential donors, or with beneficiaries of the health at Meadows for how much they’re willing to give.

Mallory: Okay, talk to me a little bit about that. I’m really curious to learn more about that.

Ayelet: That work was in the context of looking at how feedback on progress motivates people to work on their goals. And when you think about feedback and progress, you can either look back or I look forward. You can either look at how much you have done or how much is still missing.

And what we found is that for people that are highly committed to the organization that are helping, it is best to tell them how much is still missing. And you don’t always have people that never gave were more motivated by thinking about the money has been contributed. 

So to give you an example in one study, We had that, this is a study that we conducted in Seoul with an organization that was trying to raise money to children in Uganda, many years ago. And they had two groups of donors. They had people that were raising a monthly contribution, so the highly committed people, and they have people who gave their contact information, meaning they want to engage but never made any contribution, not committed, but still want to engage. What they found is that if they approach the people who are give them on a monthly basis, the highly committed individuals and tell them about the money that’s still missing, they are more likely to give than if they tell them about the money that they already had. 

The new donors, t’s just the opposite, they are more motivated if you tell them about the money that they already collected. Now, what’s going on, if you’re highly committed to a cause you are more likely to act, if you feel that you’re falling behind, if you feel that you are not quite where you want to be. They think you are much more likely to respond to. Oh, we are still so far, we are  50% away from where we want to be. You want to make progress.

If you are uncommitted, you are trying to figure out whether this is even worthy of your time or money. And so if other people are doing it, then that’s a good signal that this worthy, more than if you hear that other people are not doing it, that 50% is still missing, then you think, I guess that’s not very important for people and therefore not for me.

The critical point is that it’s just about how you monitor progress. It’s the same objective situation, you are at the 50%. You either emphasize the missing or the completed part. This is going to be a bit of a lengthy answer.

Mallory: It’s really interesting because it makes me think about even for organizations to think about donor segments, perhaps.  And what segments of their donors should be getting messaging that focuses on the what’s left to raise versus how much has been raised based on theirlevel of engagement with the organization.

And it makes sense to me, back to what you were saying, I think this is what you’re saying, correct me if I’m wrong, but that there’s this component, this identity component where the folks who are already deeply committed or giving monthly to the organization, they already have the identity component ingrained in them.

So when they hear that there’s a gap that needs to be closed, they want to participate because there perhaps there’s more buy-in around already people like me close the gap .But for the other folks, if there that identity piece hasn’t been cemented yet, what they really want is to be a part of the group of people making it happen. And that number has to be demonstrated to be big enough where they want to start to identify with the group of people doing the thing.

Ayelet: So the nice thing is, you already concluded that the result of the study that I actually did not describe yet. You’re right. What I described is a study in which what we knew is that some people are giving regularly.

They are more committed than the people who never gave money. We had the same thing as what you’ve just expressed. And so I think a few years later we went to study again with them the same organization. So this is an organization in Korea and they are giving money at this time to people in Kenya and now with directly manipulate their identity.

Great, like how much they identify with that the people who are getting the help and the way we did that is. Either talking about the beneficiaries is as our children. The children that are supported by our organization, these are all people who are already giving money to this country, to this organization to help kids.

And we talk about our kids in Kenya, they need our help. And so it feels like you are very much identifying with a group of great kids. These are the kids that we are responsible for in our organization. Versus another group that write a message about, those kids far away, remember like the donors are in Korea. These kids are in Kenya, in the other part of the world. There are these kids that they need your help. And we find exactly what you described, which is that people that feel close to those beneficiaries are giving more if we tell them how much money we are still missing. Where is that, that the people who don’t identify with the beneficiaries are giving more money if we tell them that other people are giving money.

Mallory: Wow. Okay. That is really fascinating. And I want to go back to, I feel myself making an assumption that I want to check a little bit here. When you talked about the four buckets and you talked about clarity around the goal and its relationship to motivation. Is what you’re saying that clarity is equally as critical, even when that goal isn’t set by you.

So for these donors, the organization might be setting the goal around the time bound nature of the campaign, how much they want to raise, what they want it to do. But that clarity that they’ve set is a piece of the puzzle to both motivate the fundraisers and the staff members of the organization to achieve that goal. But that clarity is also a key component for the donors to participate in the collective component of it.

Ayelet: Yes, it’s the clarity of the goal and the clarity of that progress towards the goal. Knowing exactly where we stand, need to be, how well we are doing.

Mallory: Okay, and that has equal sort of influence and power over both the fundraisers, the people asking, sending out the emails as it does the donors and funders participating in the campaign.

Ayelet: I completely agree. I would say that most of the research that we did was with the donors or the potential donors, we studied among others what motivational challenges, what motivates people to give?

Mallory: Okay. So let me ask a little bit of a different question. We were talking right now about the difference between sort of retained donors that continue to give on an ongoing basis versus newly acquired donors or people who are in that pipeline.

When you think about motivation in relation to what creates the greatest retention, the greatest repeat donors coming back year after year. Let’s say the campaign has ended the goal that was achieved related to one specific thing. And a few months later, the organization or the next year, perhaps the organization is launching a new campaign with different goals and some different messaging. What are the components of motivation that are really critical to ensure that those same donors participate again?

Ayelet: That’s a big question. One thing is really how much they feel committed, how much they feel that this is part of what they do and part of their identity. We looked at what creates this identity, what creates this connection to a campaign or to an organization more generally. And one thing that we discovered is that people think about giving, it’s part of who they are. And we often allow people to add contribute without their name, raising anonymous contribution. We found that while people might sometimes choose to do that, that feels like very little commitment. These are not the people that will think about your organization as part of their identity. 

It’s the people who sign with their name. Okay. It’s the people who gave some personality. Let me give you a few examples. We found that when people left the personal message, we there with a contribution, and this is a study in which we basically invited people to buy cookies from a charity. And by that contributing to the charity, and then some people were just buying the cookies. Other people were buying the cookies and leaving a message, and those who left a message with their name felt more committed, even though it was really, the message often was just two words for say, good luck, a very symbolic contribution.

We found him in a study that people who contributed a pen that they had for awhile, felt connected to the campaign. More than that people who did not donate this pen maybe donated the pen that they just used to sign their name and didn’t really care for. 

And even more impressive than one situation. If you create this commitment that allows you to go back to that, the person in this study in which we ask people to tell us what would be their contribution that they would consider equal to donating blood. They imagine that you had to donate blood, or you wanted to donate life, but someone offered that you’ll give money instead, how much money would be the same for you personally as donating blood.

And so people are giving us an amount, let’s say like $40, which was actually the average amount, every person has their own amount. And then we ask some people, if you donate blood, how committed are you going to be? And the other people, if you donate money, how committed you are going to be.  

People are telling us that blood is the same as monies. They made it equal. Nevertheless, those that consider donating blood are more commited, because this is such a self-giving right. This is like really giving out of your body almost. No, this of course is extreme and most organizations are not interested in our blood, but they might be interested in our signature.

Mallory: I love what you’re highlighting here, because I think we see in fundraising, so many kind of activities that are about the nonprofit, giving the donor, something in exchange for a monetary contribution, right? Giving them the pen or writing them the note. And I’m not suggesting that it’s not important to send thank you notes or anything like that. But I think what you’re saying here about how much more connected the donor feels when they also contribute something of meaning. In addition to the financial contribution, which is supported by a ton of data, we see around things like Giving Tuesday, for example, when people both volunteer and give a financial gift, there’s so much more likely to be retained because they’ve done both at the same time.

They’ve had this experience that sort of roots their identity more deeply in the organization, then the click of a button, which maybe gave them a dopamine hit for a moment. But it didn’t necessarily bind them to the organization in the same way. 

I feel like one of the things I hear from fundraisers alot is there nervousness around asking for too many things. Or when they just gave us a financial donation, so how could we then ask them to leave a note or how could we then ask them for their pen? And what I really hear you saying is that, this is like a deep desire of humans to feel connected and to build their identity with causes and organizations they care about. And it’s not about extracting things from them that they don’t want, but that them an opportunity to contribute something really meaningful.

Ayelet: Absolutely. And I completely agree with you that this is often an intuitive because we all find the thing that people want to not be bothered. Just write the check and you don’t need to leave a note.

Don’t be bothered by that. And what we find is that if you choose not to leave a note, you will not leave a note, but if I invite you to make the personal connection, this gives your donor more value. This is a social connection and when we support a close, we see ourselves as part of a group that’s doing something together. We want to be involved, we want to be part of that. And the thing we don’t want to just say, you take my money and then don’t bother me. We connect with, this is something that we do together and I want to be involved in, at least you have the option to be involved. To be part of that, the movement.

I think avery general point that as people we see ourselves as part of a group. When I say we landed on the moon or we won a game over the weekend. Well, I’m not an astronaut and I don’t play professional sports. I don’t mean that I ever did any of this. I feel like I’m part of the group. When you’re thinking about fundraising and making people part of the group is a big part of what it means to support a cause. 

Mallory: I want to shift and start to ask you some questions about fundraiser, motivation, and behavior. But before I do that, I’m curious from your research around fundraising and donor behavior. Was there anything else that you found that was really surprising to you?

Ayelet: I mentioned just one more finding, which is a wisdom study in which we looked at two messages, express support and make a difference.  I think what was somewhat intuitive, that express support means that you should give less than if I ask you to make a difference. So we expected that when the message is to express support, then people are going to be at doing less and taught to feed some of the studies were about giving money. Some of the studies were about just doing the work, helping the organization. And when we asked to express support, then, people were doing less than when we asked them to make a difference. But what was really interesting for us is that when we asked to express support, then people were much more likely to help.

And we observed this effect where expressing support means that you really feel you need to help and a very loud group of people who were willing to engage. Where is the make a difference message was suggesting that you should not do anything unless you plan to really make a difference. We really make a big thing.

And one of the studies that we found here at the University of Chicago, we found that when the messages to make a difference, then people are just giving less because only few people are willing to give a lot.

Mallory: Wow. That is really fascinating. I would have had the same assumption.

That’s really interesting. It also makes me think you had mentioned before, so maybe I’ll ask one more question about donor behavior. You had mentioned before differences in messaging that gets a lot of people to give versus fewer people to give more. Can you just tell us a little bit about.

Ayelet: Yes. So this is that a study that messages about expressing support or getting many people to give messages that are about making a difference.

The way people understand it is, give only if you can really move the needle. It’s not about every donation counts, it’s about making a difference. And what’s important for organization to the extent that organizations often need to be very clear about their goal for the campaign.

I think, let me give you the example of us as a school. If we are getting our students to give to the school, students can make a difference. We really want to use messages that emphasize expressible into getting to 100% participation. We just want to create the habit of giving back. When we approach people 15 years after they finished their degree, well at that point, we want to engage you if you only interested in making a difference.

Mallory: Yes. Okay. That’s really interesting. And especially as we think about all the different ways during COVID and the pandemic and lock down, people have been participating in activism and philanthropy in different ways. And there’s been maybe a lower barrier to entry than perhaps there was before for certain organizations.

It’s interesting how folks maybe think about what they support based on small actions or activities or little donations here. Versus where do they feel like they’re really making a difference, even when I just think about those words for myself, I’m like, oh yeah, there are a hundred things I support, but I am probably making a difference two or three of them where I’m really investing more of my time and more of my money. So now that I’m really thinking about it, I’m like, yeah, that does make sense. But my first gut, maybe because we see the language make a difference so often I would have thought that was more moving, but so I’m just really fascinated by that data.

Let me actually force myself to talk about fundraisers and motivation, because I am really interested in when we go back to those four buckets. And we think about the piece around identifying the right goals, and then also understanding the relationship between competing goals. 

As I was telling you, before we hit record that fundraising is such an uncomfortable experience, particularly for new fundraisers. Particularly when there hasn’t been work done around mindset, just the ways our brains naturally feel about fundraising and the level of sort of uncertainty activates a lot of our chatter and just inner critic.

And fundraisers and I am speaking for myself for 13 years, avoid a lot of the most impactful activities when it comes to fundraising. Those continue to organize their donor database, but they won’t send the outreach email though. We do a lot of kind of busy work and we’re like we’re fundraising, but like really we’re just doing all the busy work around fundraising and the biggest way for us to impact how much we’re actually raising is by these scarier actions. 

When I was first looking at your work though, and I was thinking about this idea of competing goals, I was like, this is also particularly hard for non-profit leaders and especially small nonprofit leaders where the executive director is responsible for so many things. And one of their goals is fundraising.

Will you just talk to us a little bit about that and how you suggest people look at competing goals and think about prioritization, especially when perhaps there’s like a fear component or a de-motivating factor related to one of them. 

Ayelet: Yeah, thank you for bringing the conversation back to where we were hoping to focus.

Let me break it into several questions. One issue is why we are uncomfortable asking people to help in the first place, will turn out that it’s largely a miss prediction, we are concerned about asking for help because we think that we will get rejected and we will feel bad about it. We under predict usually how much people are going to like getting connected to their request and how much positive feelings are going to resolve from the interaction.

So in our mind, interaction is often more negative than when it actually played out. And we know it for all kinds of requests. When you ask people for something, you invision in your mind, you’re imagining their rejection, usually that’s not what happens with them. So usually it’s much positive experience than what you imagined.

Then the second question that you’ve raised was you think that it’s going to be uncomfortable. Then what do you do? One possibility is you just try not to think about it. I will do it sometimes when I get the chance. And other possibilities is facing the discomfort and anticipating the discomfort.

There are two types of findings here. One is when you anticipate something to be hard, you’re more prepared to do that. When you engage in envisioning the obstacles you are in a way readier. I use the metaphor of preparing to lift the heavy furniture is a furniture. If you think that a piece of furniture is very light, We are going to approach it with very little force and it’s going to be really hard. If I tell you, I want you to help me lift the sofa, by the way, it’s really heavy, you will be more ready to do that. 

And that when it gets to motivated actions, when people envision the obstacles, when they say this is what I want to do, and this is what’s going to prevent me from doing it. They are better able to do that. At one point we ran a diary study in which we just had people in the morning, at list what you need to do and what will prevent you from doing it.

And just this exercise of thinking why this is going to be hard, made it easier for people. And then you’re raising that, what we call in the literature, the licensing pattern, where I don’t do that thing that I’m supposed to do, but I do something else. And that licensed me not to do the thing that I supposed to do. And maybe instead of actually making the call, I will arrange to do something else. It’s not quite making the ask, but that will make me feel licensed to not do the ask today or tomorrow.

Mallory: So is that piece around preparing themselves for, you’re probably going to look for a distraction here. This is scary, and you might distract yourself by doing this other activity. Is just knowing having awareness around that alone enough to increase motivation to take the scary action.

Ayelet: Yes, but it doesn’t mean that this is the only thing that you could do. 

Mallory:Okay. Tell us all the things. 

Ayelet: Another thing is that reframe what discomfort means to you, let’s move away from donors to a very different activity that often makes people uncomfortable and that this is acting or improvisation. 

And we recently ran a study with a second city that the famous improvisation club here in Chicago, where we found that if we tell people, your goal is to feel uncomfortable. Feeling uncomfortable is a good sign that your learning. That made them more motivated to engage in the exercise. We then used the same technique in getting people to work with information that they didn’t like or things they don’t feel comfortable but they might feel that are necessary. What we do here is encouraging people to think about your discomfort is a sign that you did the right walk today.

That you were supposed to feel uncomfortable, at least until that becomes a habit and that starts to feel uncomfortable. Particularly if you’re new, if you’re doing something new, by the way, anything you don’t feel an expert in is going to feel that comfortable. But if you think about this discomfort is a sign that I’m learning, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, then it was a productive day.

Mallory: I love that so much. We talk about that a lot inside my program, because that was a very fundamental shift for me as a fundraiser to recognize that the discomfort I was feeling right before a funder meeting was actually a really good sign that I was pushing my boundary 

And I’ll have folks come to me sometimes saying that nobody’s ever said no to them in a funder meeting or said not that much. And to me, I’m like, that’s not a good sign. That means you’re not asking anywhere near what your funders are capable of. And I think that’s just such an important point that I just want to put a pin in for listeners, which is like that discomfort is such a good sign that you are fundraising on your edge, that you’re pushing yourself to think bigger, that  there is not a lot of great fundraising that happens inside folks comfort zone. So I really, I’m really glad that you brought that up and I’m curious going back to the fourth bucket around using the help of others to stay motivated.

I’m thinking now about fundraising teams and how they can use some of the principles that you’ve talked about here to support, internal support for overall annual fundraising goals, but also creating space for some of the things you’ve said that discomforts okay and how they can create a culture or a support system that really keeps everyone motivated.

Ayelet: I think you are referring to a culture that acknowledges that there are setbacks, there are failures, that it doesn’t always work as you anticipated. Because you’ll absolutely right, if it works exactly as you do your best case scenario, then maybe you should adjust you best case scenario. Maybe you’re not asking for enough.

I remember that one point, I’m not a great baker, when I make a whipped cream, I never know how long to mix it. So I once read the advice just over mix it once and then you will see many minutes after you thought that it actually happens. So I took that idea for many other goals in my life without much moving forward and just that I see what it takes to fail.

So you understand, you get a sense of when you’re asking too much from other people or from yourself, this is the kind of thing where it’s not going to work. We want to be in this area where, you know, not everything that we are doing is a success. So we know that we are pushing ourselves and then we need to have a culture that celebrates the failure, that learns from failure.

What we find too often is that people either don’t learn anything from negative experience. That means they don’t even remember it. They can’t even tell you what happened. Or that they learn way too much, instead of extracting a lesson, this was not the right way, what is the right way? The lesson that they take from the experiences that this is just not for me.

Okay. I cannot do this either I don’t even remember that I failed. Or I make this completely over generalized lesson than that I just cannot do that. And then the work is hard to get people to get the specific lesson. What is the lesson here, did you ask at the wrong time? Did you ask the wrong person?  Did you ask for too much? What is the specific lesson that you can extract? A growth mindset comes to mind as a way to think about what you have learned instead of what does it mean about your personality, whatever that means in the first place. Something that we tried just as an exercise that we find extremely beneficial is asking people to give advice based on their failed experience.

And what we do is asking people who are struggling with something to give advice to another struggler. We didn’t do it with donors, but we did it with unemployed people or who was overweight, or with that students that were struggling with coursework. What we asked these people is to give advice to another struggler.

And the first thing that they usually say is why would you ask me I’m unemployed? Why would you ask me how to get a job? And I will tell you, I  ask you because obviously, you are struggling. And then they give advice. Often the advice is very important and meaningful and good, but what’s more important for us. They are motivated by their advice, giving advice to another person often helps you extract the lessons that you have learned from your experience.

Mallory: That reminds me a lot of Dr. Cross’s work around distance self-talk and just the activity, even of envisioning, what would you say to a friend in this situation?

So I love that connection. I want to ask you one other question before we have you share all the different ways for folks to find and get in touch with you. I’m curious about the tracking of progress towards a goal, that piece that you talked about, how important it is to have clarity around the goal, but then also to really be following your progress towards that goal.

Do you ever suggest that based on what you were just talking about around the failure component or needing to pivot, do you ever suggest that in that middle zone, when they’re tracking their progress towards a goal, if they’re struggling in a certain way, or if there’s certain indicators that it’s time to perhaps set a different goal.

Ayelet: More to set sub goals what I mean by that is that in the middle of that we see this decline in motivation. So let’s say you want to, I don’t know, collect $1,000 for a cause of the first and second failed donations will feel like you are making fast progress. That first person that gave $50 of the second person another $50 you’ve doubled toward the end. Again, it feels like fast progress because you can see that the gap to the end goal closing very quickly. I think the middle, your actions, other people’s actions often seem like a drop in the back. It’s hard to see how these actions are important for the cause.

You don’t see progress and this undermines motivation. And so you just break the goal targets that we set. I know that the organization is not going to stop the work once they have reached the goals. If you’re collecting $1,000 for your cause done when you reach that goal, you have just done with the sub goal and there will be another thing next and the idea is to create is short-term goals that are sufficiently challenging, but also you can still see for where’s. The middle is not too long.

Mallory: We’re going to have a link for, Get It Done, your book in the show notes and everything. I really feel like fundraisers and fundraising teams need to buy your book and then design their fundraising strategies and plans building in these components around goal setting. And I love this idea of really paying attention to the middle and what’s happening in the middle and the sub goals. So thank you so much. I know that we have just touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of all of your wisdom around these issues. So tell folks the best way to follow along with your work or connect with you.

And then I always invite folks, iIf they’d like to highlight a nonprofit that’s near and dear to their heart, that we spotlight on the show as well.

Ayelet: All Animals Organizations. Yeah, I don’t want to choose one because I like them all. Giveto the animals and how to reach me, et my book, Get It Done, Surprising lessons from the science of motivation and go on my website Ayeletfishback.com. And if you ever want to study with your charity, then they get in touch and let’s think about how to study, what gets people to give.

Mallory:  I love that. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for all of this wisdom today.

Ayelet: Thank you very much. Such a pleasure talking to you.