The Science of Giving: Does giving make you happy?
- Thu, December 02 2010
- Filed under: Fundraising essentials
There’s a new book out with incredibly fascinating insights for all nonprofit marketing and fundraising folks. It’s called The Science of Giving, and it catalogs a range of seminal studies about giving psychology. The content is amazing, though it’s written in academic language, with sentences like: “Analyses of how empathic versus mood management feelings were related to donation decisions confirmed findings from Study 1.” I’m afraid this dryness and its hefty cost ($75) might deter people. That would be a shame, because the findings are so important.
In fact, I think this book is so packed with gems, I’m blogging all of the 14 studies in the book this month. I will be your Cliff Notes for this classic.
Today’s topic: feeling good about giving.
In this first chapter, Lalin Anik, Lara Aknin, Michael Norton and Elizabeth Dunn review the research on:
1. Does giving make you happy?
2. Do happy people give more?
3. Does focusing on payback from giving help inspire more giving? Can you raise more money if you highlight that giving brings you benefits?
Here’s what they found.
1. Giving makes you happy. People who committed random acts of kindness were significantly happier than those who didn’t, and spending money on others makes you happier than spending money on yourself.
2. Happier people help others more, and they give more. A positive mood makes you nicer!
3. This makes a circle: giving makes you happy, and when you’re happy you give more, which makes you happier, which makes you give more.
4. If you highlight the payback of giving, it can help or hurt. Incentive-based appeals and gifts to donors seem to crowd out the inherent, altruistic motivation of those donors. Sending out something like a tote bag might actually detract from the warm-fuzzy a donor felt when they gave - and make them less altruistic in the future. In other words, if you train people to react to a market norm, they lose the social norm. For example, a matching gift campaign elevated giving short term - but depressed giving over time. That said, reminding people of the happiness that giving provides them DOES have a good effect on generosity.
The bottom line? Make giving about the feelings - happy ones - that come from genuine generosity.
Comments
Thanks for the summary. Results are good news for nonprofit folks and givers. Good to share with your board members.
This is exactly what I was looking for,Now this is highly recommended post for me.I am impressed with all this useful information.
This reminds me of the Friends episode where they tried not to feel good when doing a good deed. It’s impossible. Not sure you need science to back this up, but I’m glad it does. It’s interesting that we’re made to feel good when we do good. Makes the world a whole lot nicer place. I’ll look forward to checking out your cliffs notes version of this hefty tome.
This work on happiness is so important as well as its connection to giving. We have integrated several insights gained from Mike Norton’s work into The Dragonfly Effect.
The insight that you run the risk of transforming a donation into a market-based exchange when you offer a ‘gift with donation’ is powerful. So many big nonprofits still seem to employ this approach.
The insight that it might be counterproductive to building donor loyalty is powerful and makes gift with purchase offers worth reexamining. Effectively influencing behavior is so much better accomplished when we pay more attention to how people actually react when we do something than simply to how things are supposed to be done in our field.
Thanks for a crisp and clear summary of the work.
Thanks Andy. Maybe you can help me with the seeming contradiction in the study I posted today. I agree with everything you say, yet at the same time the research I posted today seemed to suggest combining giving with receiving works better. Though I would note, those studies asked people theoretical reactions and didn’t measure actual giving over time.
Hey Katya - Naturally, I defer to Norton et. al. for a better answer, but I do have an interpretation of this point.
Related observations that we came across while researching http://DragonflyEffect.com suggest that the psychological trigger of the market exchange is the key here.
Keeping your donor gift from pulling that trigger is how you keep things positive. The closer the thing that the donor receives is to currency, the more potentially negative the effect.
So when DonorsChoose.org sends donors hand-written (or drawn) thank you notes from the classroom that they supported (truly something that money can’t buy, thus distant from currency), it has an extremely positive effect.
In contrast, the marketplace mental calculus you go through when you get a totebag (something you could buy and know the approximate value of) with your $50 donation reiterates the financial aspects of your donation.* It also makes the gift—that you now tend to think of as a purchase, seem like a bad deal, and one you are less likely to repeat.
*Another stream of research by Vohs et. al. shows money-priming puts people in a less generous, more closed-off frame of mind.
Hey, I’ve been following for a while and just wanted to say thanks for great information. We do a lot of work with non-profits and charities, and although sometimes it can be tricky, some of your posts really justify that we’re doing the right thing! thanks!
Even I think that giving makes you happy thanks for sharing this with us
very often we run, run, run and forget what really matters in life!! i read your article and i remember what really make a person happy!!
thanks!!!