Introduction: The Psychology of Giving
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 569 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy.
In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Luke Freeman. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly.
Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello everyone.
My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast.
If your organization asks people to donate, sponsor, contribute or support a cause, you’re not competing the way you used to. Your mission may not have changed, but the environment your audience is in has shifted dramatically and that impacts you more than you may realize.
People today have more options, more noise, and fewer clean moments of attention, if any. And in that environment, most organizations accidentally end up asking people to do something that feels simple internally, but it’s surprisingly complicated in the outside world.
That’s because your donor isn’t only deciding whether or not to give, they’re deciding, is this the right choice? Will this actually work? Can I trust what’s going to happen after I click and if I give to you, what am I not giving to?
That’s a lot of cognitive load to put on someone while they’re standing in line scrolling between meetings or trying to wrap up a quarter. Which is why this refreshed episode, which originally aired in November of 2022, still matters so much today.
Luke Freeman is the global CEO of Giving What We Can. And in this conversation, I’m excited to introduce you to Luke Freeman. When we recorded this conversation, he was the global CEO of Giving What We Can. And he brings a really valuable blend of marketing thinking and evidence-based generosity to this conversation of giving.
And he’s someone who cares about what happens on both sides of that decision. As you listen, I want you to keep a question in the back of your mind, especially if you write appeals, build campaigns, run fundraising, lead a nonprofit, sit on a board, anything like that.
That question is, are you making it easy for someone to feel confident that saying yes to you is the smart, values-aligned choice in a world full of worthy choices?
Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/569. Now let’s jump right in.
Luke Freeman, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
Luke Freeman’s Background in Effective Giving
Luke Freeman: Well, thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. So just to kick things off, if you can share for everyone who doesn’t yet know you a little bit about your background and the work that you do.
Luke Freeman: Yeah. So, my background is actually in marketing for most of my career. And then most recently I moved into the not-for-profit sector where I lead the organization Giving What We Can, which is a community of effective givers who try and make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. Yeah.
Melina Palmer: And so how does behavioral science fit into that? And the work that you do, is it just a passion project, kind of on the side, something that you’ve liked, or how does that fit into your work?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, it’s actually interesting. Behavioral science was one of the reasons why I became a member of Giving What We Can back in 2016. So I’d been reading a lot of behavioral science. This is kind of back in 2011, 2012, and things like the hedonic treadmill—as you increase your income, your expenses will often increase to that level as well.
And at the same time I was thinking about the value of money as well, like the marginal impact of money on your own wellbeing. And I was quite aware of a lot of the issues that the world was facing. And so I decided that I wanted to give a pretty meaningful part of my income to help others at a time when I’d gone from very low income to a reasonable income so that I wouldn’t notice the difference.
I’m noticing that my income is going up even though at the same time I’m giving a lot more to help others than I had previously given. So it’s actually the behavioral science background led me to decide to give a pretty significant chunk of my income to helping others and then find, when I went to do that, I was like, well, I really care about that going as far as it can, which is not a very common charitable behavior.
Often people are quite driven by what’s immediately in front of them. But I was a bit of a nerd and really cared about impact more than necessarily anything else when I was trying to give. So I then found the early work of Giving What We Can, and another charity evaluator called GiveWell, and then started to act on that advice.
And then many years later, after giving in this way, the organization was looking for an executive director. I had executive experience and also growth experience. So it was great to be able to come on board and lead an organization that is doing work that is really important to me.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, that’s awesome.
The Gap Between Popularity and Impact
Melina Palmer: And just to elaborate a bit on what you were talking about, and I saw this in some of the materials you sent me in advance too. I want to make sure that—because I think there was something really important like you’re saying on that giving as effectively as you can.
Which what I hear with that and what you were saying is potentially there’s that maybe like an availability bias or like the most popular ones, the ones we hear about a lot, it feels like that’s where we should be giving our money. Because that’s what you do. Right? This is the name I’ve seen a lot, so this feels safer to me maybe than something else.
But those that are most known might not have your dollars or whatever type of currency you’re working with go as far. So can you share a little bit about that?
Luke Freeman: Yeah. So, typically when people go to give to charity, they are giving, as you said, to things that are right in front of them or things that they have had some experience with. However, when we take time to actually reflect, most of us come down to the fact that what we care about is improving lives or saving lives—whether that be quality or duration of lives, whether it be humans or animals. And whether that’s happening now or later down the track, generally what we care about is how good lives are.
And when you take a step back and think about things from that perspective, you find that there are just huge differences in how much any particular charitable intervention actually improves lives. In fact, when they’ve studied a lot of social interventions, many of them don’t turn out to work at all. And some of them turn out to do harm once you actually apply some rigorous methodology.
So when you’re in the category of ones that even do improve lives, say for example, looking at public health interventions in developing countries, even then you end up with kind of two orders of magnitude, so like 100 times difference between the median and the top ones. And then same in the other direction. So it’s kind of from 100 times better or 100 times worse, depending on what you pick.
So this is just like incredible numbers. So that was just really eye opening to me. But when people start to think about charity effectiveness, generally the two things that they think of, one is things like overheads or administrative costs, and that kind of ties into the availability bias.
So it’s very easy to go, oh, this charity spends 10% or 30% or 5% on administration and think administration is bad. That could be office space or it could be also things like actually evaluating their programs. So spending money on evaluating their programs increases the overhead, it decreases the amount they’re able to spend on their programs, but that increases the effectiveness of their programs.
So there are things like Charity Navigator, for example, is well known in the space in the US for sucking in a lot of information from legally required documents, like tax filings and stuff like that. Just looking at kind of category names and then spitting out numbers like overhead ratio. And that’s what people often think about when they think of effectiveness.
But that doesn’t tie back to impact as much. So when people think about impact, it’s actually a lot more to do with the intervention. For example, imagine there’s a charity that was entirely volunteer run, it had a lot of its supplies that were needed for the intervention donated and so that for every dollar someone donated, there was $100 worth of the intervention given out.
But if it turned out they were giving massages to millionaires, and what was donated was some massage oil, the impact of that intervention may not be incredibly high, even though it might be very operationally efficient.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, interesting. And I hope that that charity doesn’t exist.
Luke Freeman: No, I have to be very particular with giving fictional examples because I try not to rag on any particular organization, because ultimately I think I am so supportive of anyone trying to do good. I think that’s the first bar you’ve got to get people to: to look outside of themselves and try and improve the lives of others. But once you’re there, really narrowing in on that impact and trying to find just the things that are going to do a huge amount of good and make sure that at least those things don’t go unfunded.
Comparing Interventions: Seeing Eye Dogs vs. Cataract Surgery
Melina Palmer: Yeah, well, and I think it was important also just so—I end every episode of the podcast with “be thoughtful.” And that’s my email signature. That’s like my thing. Right. And I think being more thoughtful about where you choose to give money and why you’re giving money and looking at time or whatever it is with an organization and knowing, you know, what is it that you want to be doing or working towards.
So there was an example in one of the papers that you sent, or it might have been off of a website, but it was talking about, you know, the cost for training a seeing eye dog versus this particular surgery that was able to counteract or prevent people from going blind, essentially. Right. Do you know this off the top of your head to be able to mention it, or do you want me to kind of keep going?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, I think it’s around the order of 40 to 60 thousand dollars to train a seeing eye dog, which can help one person for a few years, versus very conservatively, $1,000 for cataract surgeries—but even cheaper if you’re not as conservative on those estimates. So we’re talking here at least a 40x, if not more of like 100 or 200x improvement in terms of the number who you could restore sight for completely versus helping improve their life without sight.
Melina Palmer: Right. And I think it is just important. So actually I had a friend growing up who trained seeing eye dogs and so got to be part of that experience. I wasn’t allowed to have a dog at the house myself, so I would always enjoy it. And she trained two or three of the dogs over time. And, you know, that is important. And there are some people where the correct surgery or something won’t help them. Right. So we still need this other piece.
But when you look at how you want your money to be spent—looking and not just saying, “oh, this is the right thing, because this is the thing everyone’s talking about, so that must be where my money should go.” But just taking a moment to say, “what do I care about? Whose life am I looking to impact and why, and what’s going to be the best use of whatever money that I’m putting out there?”
So where the other charity—not the seeing eye dog one—but maybe people don’t even know about it all that much. And if you only have $200 to give, that could help one person and it’s not going to go as far on the other side if you don’t have $40,000 to give, which I’m guessing a lot of people don’t.
Luke Freeman: Yeah, things can go just a lot further. And yeah, and this is a key thing that we often find when you’re seeking out super high impact interventions is one of the three criteria we often look at is neglectedness.
Popular problems are often getting a lot of resources already because people are aware of them, and they’re in front of their faces and you’re getting also some level of bandwagon effect. People sometimes want to be part of the moment. And we see that with things like disaster relief giving. It’s great that people jump in. I love that it activates people to think about what’s going on in the world.
But sadly they are often inundated with things that don’t necessarily need—especially sending stuff. So people—there are just so many cases like there’s a disaster, people try to send stuff to the place like clothes or something like that, and then they are just inundated with stuff they can’t really do much with.
And what they need is much higher context solutions that are often quite complicated. And even better is prevention. And so there is a lot of stuff that’s really neglected because it fits into the prevention space. So it’s a lot harder to market those charities.
On the behavioral side of things, you’ve got things like the identifiable victim effect. So if you show a single person who you could help and you said they’re in a position which is often quite demeaning—if you show a video of a starving child in Africa and say “this person’s going to go hungry if you don’t give now,” people are more likely to give right away out of a sense of guilt often or pity.
But that’s not necessarily sustainable giving over the long term, and it also doesn’t bear on the scale of the problem. And sometimes there are just some very, very big problems which if you just show the scale, that kind of can be defeating as well because people go, “oh, this is just too much. My donation isn’t going to make a difference.”
But at the end of the day there is really strong data to know that the impact of your donation can really scale and you can have quite an outsized impact especially if you’re someone from a country like America or Australia where we’re in the top 5% of global earners. And if you’re middle income in these countries you’re more likely to be in the top 2% of global earners.
And looking at the marginal impact of money on well-being, you’re really hitting diminishing returns in places like where we live. Whereas in many places in the world, that money is the difference. What we might spend on a coffee or not is the difference between all of our expenses for the day—whether we eat or not or whether our kid goes to school. And you see this in other fields as well, in the environment, in animal welfare, in things that might affect the future as well.
Behavioral Science Strategies for Nonprofits
Melina Palmer: So building on that then, I’m sure and as I mentioned to you in wanting to do this episode is knowing that people have been finding that there is a difference in the way that when we apply behavioral science concepts to a traditional buying relationship—when people are paying money to get goods or services—the tactics and concepts work in a particular way.
And they don’t necessarily go exactly the same way when we’re looking at for nonprofits or in that charitable space. Sometimes things that work in business backfire. I know from when I did the first episode on reciprocity, you know, if you give people a gift when they’ve given a donation, sometimes that can actually backfire because they feel like, “well, I was just giving because I wanted to, but now it feels like a weird financial transaction.” Yeah. Right.
So for anyone who’s listening, who is with a nonprofit organization, whether they’re on a board or they’re an executive director or whatever else and they’re looking for creating their messaging, what tips and insights do you have? Is there anything they definitely should do and anything they definitely should not do?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, so there’s a lot there. And the other thing that’s interesting is I would just want to flag up front that because a lot of the work that I’m doing is within a segment of donors who really care about impact, what we find works for us is different to what works for the sector at large. And some of these things are fighting against the stuff that I care about in a sense.
If I care about impact, for example, that’s something you want to affect a lot of people. But what is better at raising money is to do things like show a single identifiable beneficiary in a state which may not necessarily be giving them a lot of dignity. So there is this very soul-searching question that we have to ask when we are in the charity marketing space: what kind of marketing do we want to do? What kind of behaviors do we want to enforce?
And for example, people might care a lot around what percentage goes to the charity. So this is kind of the “overhead myth” as I mentioned. So even just something like if there are credit card fees, charities often try and hide that, even though it’s just a transparent cost of what it is. And by showing it to people, they’re more likely to ask to do something like a bank transfer, which immediately might seem nice that you don’t necessarily have the same fees, but the operational cost to the charity to reconcile that bank transfer may be more than the small fee that a credit card provider charges.
But we’ll go through some of these. So, yeah, there’s this kind of general thing that donors want to feel confident in their donation. And so they might be thinking about, “well, can they see the impact?” Which is a very human way of doing it. We lean into, “well, what’s the evidence of the impact?”
But there’s others, things like showing that others have also given as well. At Giving What We Can, we have a variety of causes, and it’s hard to lean in too hard to any one of them. So actually just showing other humans and why they give and why it’s important to them—that’s quite motivating. It’s actually often more motivating to come from another donor than from the charity itself.
So we encourage people to be public in their giving, and not showy or anything like that. But, for example, being willing to be on our website, but also being willing to use your own social media and conversations. Because by hiding the fact that people give, everyone assumes that everyone else isn’t giving. And not talking about where we give, we don’t get to have those conversations around what might be impactful or not. And those stories that really motivate people don’t get out there.
So your donor base is super important when it comes to the success of the charity and therefore the beneficiaries and how much good you’re able to do for them.
Corporate Partnerships and Social Proof
Melina Palmer: Yeah, a question building on that, actually. So, you know, we’ve seen a lot over the years now that Facebook does the “for my birthday, I’m raising money for whatever else” and you can have that go up on your page. I don’t know how effective those sorts of things actually are for raising money or awareness or if they just sort of exist.
But so like you’re saying, the social proof piece being really important—being able to see others doing things, and especially others like us, is going to make us more likely to donate. Do you have any thoughts on where an organization may align themselves? We have a lot of people who own their own businesses or work with large organizations and having that corporation identify with and tie to a specific charity or nonprofit. Does that have an impact as well?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, it works often more from the perspective of the organization. So sometimes it is valuable. Like it’s a classic—you see on many websites “as seen in” with the press and our partners and a list of logos and if people recognize those or they seem legitimate, they click through. That is a sense of validating trust, particularly with any online transaction. People are looking for trust signals and that can be the fact that people have been willing to lend their brand.
On the company side of things, it’s a tricky one. There is some evidence that consumers, all things being equal, will prefer a company that has some kind of ethical practice. That being said, sometimes it backfires. We’ve seen this in tests done on plant-based meats. I think it was Impossible or Beyond or something like that. And they had environmental messaging versus just taste messaging.
And people were less likely to choose it when they said “it’s better for the environment.” There are reports about people thinking that the quality is going to be worse or that they’re going to be charged more. But in some cases, if you get the right story, it can really work for the company in terms of their own sales as well.
There is a tricky thing where people really prefer that there’s some kind of logical story told of why that charity or that cause makes sense for that company. Which is great if you can tell that story. The tricky thing is sometimes charities or causes are picked purely because there is some tie into the company and it may not necessarily be a great thing for people to give to.
For example, the case of TOMS shoes, which you might be familiar with, they had the “buy one, give one” model. You buy a pair of shoes and they’ll give a pair to a kid in Africa. The problem being that much of the time shoes weren’t what was needed. It was also disruptive to the local economy of shoemakers. They would often be sold at a heavy discount because they’re flooded with them and then that money would be used for things that they actually really needed. So you’re having a huge loss in the effectiveness.
So it can be a double-edged sword trying to match a cause to a company. But I’ve seen companies do a really good job of this even just saying that they give to some of the world’s most effective charities backed by strong evidence and vetted by trusted charity evaluators. It’s kind of like that sense of trust comes in.
And so we work with companies who’ve taken a company pledge to give 10% of profits to these high impact causes. Sometimes they pick ones where again there is an easier story to tell. For example, we had “R U OK? Day” in Australia recently and an organization was specifically looking to raise money around mental health. But they were able to find a great charity, StrongMinds, which is doing work in places like Uganda and doing group talk therapy which has great evidence. And the scale that you’re getting for being willing to shift the beneficiary group to be women in Uganda just has this huge increase in impact.
The Power of Specificity and Storytelling
Melina Palmer: So just like with any brand messaging—knowing like we both have backgrounds in marketing when you can be specific and narrowing the story down because our brains love nostalgia and stories. I’m going to be linking to that episode here.
I tell people this all the time for anything you’re pitching: to say “there are 500,000 children in whatever location that are hungry” is important, but people go “Okay, right.” But then when you’re able to follow the story of someone—and making sure we of course have to keep human dignity in mind—but being able to say “This is Ann, her stomach is rumbling and she’s trying to do her homework but not sure if she’s going to have anything to eat tonight.”
And then you can say “There are 500,000 other children just like Ann in our community.” You can do that bit of the story to help it feel more real. And when you can tie that back into why this matters to our organization, then that can be beneficial.
What I’m hearing from you is finding a nonprofit that you really align with as an organization and knowing that that trust can kind of go both ways and it can be a really mutually beneficial relationship.
Luke Freeman: Yeah. There are also things that just don’t work that people think work.
Melina Palmer: Yes, please tell all this.
Luke Freeman: So for example, trying to force snap judgments. So people often try and get people on the spot, get them in a situation where they’re trying to get into intuitive thinking instead of deliberative thinking. And the classic is someone on the street asking for donations. And that doesn’t increase behavior.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some level of reactance there as well—that people are like “Actually now I don’t want to give to this organization ever.” Obviously some people do give, but it’s much less effective than other marketing methods. And it could actually be a net negative in terms of the fundraising of the organization, even though they’ll report the money that did come in and therefore think it’s working.
There’s also donation matching—it’s a really popular one, but there’s not a lot of strong evidence for that. It may not have much of an effect, even though it’s something that people try and do a lot. There can be specific things that it helps with, for example to shift donation behavior. So if someone’s about to give $50 and you say “if you make this a recurring donation, another donor will give an extra 50,” that may be more likely, but it doesn’t necessarily change the initial “will they give or not” behavior.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And I’ve seen sometimes where you’re going to do the $50 one-time donation and then if you were to say “hey do you want to make this be $10 a month?” You’re locked in for the first five months but then it’ll just keep going. But it feels a little bit better as $10 when you were thinking you were going to give 50, and then it can just go on and on. Any thoughts on that sort of reframe?
Luke Freeman: Yeah. So I think that’s a good reframe. Generally speaking, recurring donations make a lot more sense for many donors. It’s much more sustainable and better for the charity. So if people care about charities not spending a lot on marketing, well then don’t make lots of small one-off donations because each time they’re trying to convince you to do it.
Instead, have a budget for what you want to give. For example, we recommend people think of it as a percentage of their income. Then you’ve got that budget and just give that amount on a regular basis. You’ve made that decision, you’ve been intentional, and you revisit that once in a while. But that means that the charitable sector in general is a lot more efficient and effective.
Myth-Busting: What Actually Works in Influence
Luke Freeman: Another one—there are two things that I think may have come from the Art of Persuasion. What was the book? It’s like a classic marketing book—Influence.
Melina Palmer: I think Robert Cialdini.
Luke Freeman: Yeah, Cialdini. And the other one I think was Dan Ariely. I think these two seem to work but then just have not replicated to the same degree. And that’s the “door-in-the-face” technique—so where people request a large amount and then come back with a smaller amount, that hasn’t really worked for money. People generally have an idea of what they want to give. You can maybe anchor a bit, but again, you may end up just putting people off altogether.
And then the other one is artificial surveillance cues—so placing a picture of eyes above a donation jar or something like that. It was a weird result that it was novel and people liked it, but it just hasn’t really held up.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. So with Influence—so the door-in-the-face and the foot-in-the-door. I talk about those in the reciprocity episode. But the example given there is not about money being donated. It’s asking for volunteers. So it’s the big ask of, “do you want to be a volunteer for two years for this program?” A random person says no. And then you say, “oh, well, we’re doing this two-hour tour with these kids. Would you be interested in doing that?” And then more people would say yes when it was something to do with time.
Luke Freeman: Yeah, volunteerism is something that I haven’t focused on as much, but it’s an interesting one. We’ve had heaps of volunteers come in. And we have a really wide spectrum of volunteers—right from people who occasionally give an opinion on which title we should use for an email, to the other extreme.
One of our volunteers is out here on our team retreat in Australia who we ended up actually poaching him from his job for a few months on a smaller grant. And it started off with actually just recognizing their contribution and having that more human connection. I saw he was a UX designer and I was like, “if you have any feedback I would always be ears.” He then wrote back like a two-page document and then went on from there and ended up redesigning our entire brand. So Alex, thank you.
Melina Palmer: Yay. Thanks Alex.
Luke Freeman: But yeah, the one thing to be careful of with volunteering is that the match between what the volunteers can bring and what the organization needs is a really hard thing to get right. So volunteering strategies are going to be very specific to the organization’s context.
A lot of charities, their volunteering programs are actually a donor management or donor nurturing program in disguise. I’ve seen things where corporate volunteering—getting people to come in and do some stuff on the ground—is more than anything showcasing the work that the charity does. They might need to hire double the staff to manage the corporates and make sure they didn’t stuff anything up, but at the end of it they had a bunch of people who now wanted to be donors.
So there is a lot of volunteering that does end up in that category. It’s how you want to use that information. Do you want to set up a program which is a donor engagement program? If you’re sitting there going, “oh gosh, they do terrible work and this is costing us money to manage,” well, you don’t expect people to come in from a white-collar job and then do something that they have no idea how to do because it turns out all work is skilled work.
But sometimes those people may be better to recruit as a board member or an advisory board where what’s expected of them is that they host a dinner with friends and they get them to sponsor an entire program. You could say, “hey, this is going to cost $100,000. You’re the kind of person who could maybe give $10,000 if you can get 10 friends.” And maybe that’s a better way of engaging with that segment.
Actionable Tips for Year-End Appeals
Melina Palmer: Interesting. And I think too, from having been on boards and doing some consulting in this space—don’t get too hung up in thinking that the thing you’re asking someone for is such a big deal. And don’t go priming them into thinking it’s going to be really hard or really expensive before you ask them. If you say, “oh, I know it’s so hard to give money, but if you can, please, please,” they might go “oh it is hard, I can’t do that.”
Luke Freeman: Yeah. Don’t give people reasons not to do the thing you want them to do.
Melina Palmer: Yes, please.
Luke Freeman: But also appreciate after the fact, when someone has done something or if someone can’t do something, appreciate the fact that it may have been a big ask and then come in with something which is the right way of doing that re-ask.
Melina Palmer: Right? Yeah. Yes. Even if they say no to the big thing, it doesn’t mean that they won’t do a smaller thing.
So for everyone who is at a nonprofit or advises one, if you do one thing in the next month before the end of the year, what’s the one thing that should definitely be on their radar for those year-end asks?
Luke Freeman: Oh, it’s a tough question because as I said before, context is absolutely everything. I would say you really need to get in the head of your user—and in this case that is a donor. Think about your existing donor base. They’re the biggest asset that you have. Why have they come? If you’re looking to get them to give more or to give again, tell them again what they have told you.
For example, when people sign a giving pledge at Giving What We Can, we ask them why they did so. And what people say there is so telling. We know for our audience, showing that back to other people who might be similar and telling our members again that reasoning is what’s really important for us. The thing that really resonates is that people are very aware of the relative luck that they might have and that they really care that they are able to help others. We hear that, we tell that back to them, and we try to live up to that.
Fundraising “Hot or Not”
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Okay, I’ve decided that I’m going to do something I’ve never done on the show, but it feels like the right time. This is like our “hot or not” moment. Okay, so:
Live auctions, hot or not?
Luke Freeman: In the right format I think it really works. There’s the energy in the room that does really push people along.
Melina Palmer: Silent auction, hot or not?
Luke Freeman: I think it works as an augmentation. If you’re doing an event, it’s the type of thing you have both.
Melina Palmer: Okay. And then one last one—a board member phone call out to random people asking for donations. Hot or not?
Luke Freeman: Random people? I think not hot.
Melina Palmer: Previous donors?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, someone in their Rolodex who’s a really good prospect—definitely hot.
Melina Palmer: Okay, but if you were to tell the people on your board, “call these hundred people that you’ve never met before and ask them to donate to us”?
Luke Freeman: No, I think it’s not super effective.
Conclusion: Reducing Uncertainty for Donors
Melina Palmer: Well, thank you for playing some of that with me. Luke, for people who want to learn more about you and Giving What We Can, what is their next best step?
Luke Freeman: Yeah, so number one thing I recommend is heading to our website givingwhatwecan.org. There we have reports on high impact causes and lists of top charities which we recommend, as well as many guides for just how to think about charity and how to decide between causes. And then if you want to be inspired, you can read stories of people where impact is their goal and generosity is a key part of the way they live their life.
Melina Palmer: Perfect. And Giving What We Can is not just in Australia, right?
Luke Freeman: We are in fact international. We have members from 92 or 94 countries, and we’re tax deductible in the US, UK and the Netherlands.
Melina Palmer: Awesome. Well thank you again so much, Luke, for coming on the show and just taking a tiny bite out of all the potential things we could have been talking about today.
Luke Freeman: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. It’s been really lovely.
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Luke Freeman for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation?
One thing that’s really stuck with me is how easy it is for organizations to assume that if people care about the mission, the decision to give should be straightforward. But your donor isn’t making that decision in a vacuum. They’re making it in a world full of worthy causes.
And the reality of human decision making is that more options rarely create clarity. They create friction. So the donor isn’t just deciding whether to support your mission. They have to decide whether this is the best use of their precious attention, trust and resources. And when that decision feels uncertain, the brain is going to start looking for shortcuts: familiarity, simplicity, social proof, whatever feels safest.
Which means one of the most powerful things any organization can do is reduce uncertainty. Be clear about what the support does, why it matters, and how someone will know their decision made a difference. This is true whether you’re asking for donations, sponsorship, looking for internal buy-in, or even looking for customer trust.
The psychology behind the decision is remarkably similar. So here’s a question to take with you this week: Are you making it easy for people to feel confident they chose well when they say yes to you?
Whatever your thoughts are, if you’re open to sharing, please do come share them with me on social media. You’ll find us as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere, and I am Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links to my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch and more. It’s all waiting for you at thebrainybusiness.com/569.
Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun. You don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
Would you like me to create a summary of the key behavioral science concepts mentioned in this transcript, such as the identifiable victim effect and the overhead myth?
