As many of you know, a large part of what I do for a living is raise money for causes, campaigns, and charities.  (By the way, if you would like to know, I’m currently working for a great cause, www.newleafservices.org).  I actually enjoy the process.  And it is as much a science now-a-days as it is an art.  There are things that work and things that don’t work.  And the crux of the matter is why do people give at all.  You really don’t get anything in return in a tangible way; perhaps some tax breaks, a feeling of wellness and community, and a fulfillment of community responsibility.

We really don’t need to guess why people give.  There is a lot of science that exists.  Today I read a fascinating article from smart money about some of the newest science.  There is a lot of good stuff to read there, but here is a good list of why people give money:

We give when it can help us directly. Some giving is quite self-centered. Alumni giving, to take one example, has been found to correlate in size and frequency to a less-than-shocking variable: the age of one’s child and the likelihood of his or her applying to the school in question.

We give when it can help us indirectly, by raising our social status — helping us appear wealthy or generous. In another study on alumni giving, Yale economist Dan Karlan found (in a paper delightfully titled, “Hey Look at Me”) that individuals were more likely to give when offered public recognition in a newsletter and that they were more likely to donate at a higher level if informed that donors would be separated into giving “circles” based on the amount given. While we may not want to believe that we donate to charity for recognition and social status, empirical research has found that anonymous donations are exceedingly rare (perhaps as low as 1% of all donations) — even though they’re eligible for the same tax treatment as other donations.

We give to alleviate guilt and repair our self-image. In a recent column I discussed how when people focused on good things about themselves, they felt less need to engage in good deeds, such as donating to charity. Well, the flip side of that same experiment — where people wrote positive or negative essays about themselves and then were asked to donate up to $10 to a charity of their choice — is that the people who focused on the bad things about themselves donated five times more than those who wrote about their positive traits. As the study’s authors put it, “when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.”

We give when it can increase our odds with the opposite sex. (my note here:  it can also work when LGBT people are involved) In another experiment, by University of Chicago economist John List, a team tested the effectiveness of various door-to-door fundraising techniques. One technique that had tremendous success: turning up the hotness of the woman who asked for money (“a one-standard deviation increase in physical attractiveness,” in scientific lingo). This increased average donations by 50% to 135%. As the paper delicately puts it: “This result is largely driven by increased participation rates among households where a male answered the door.”

The bottom line is that what does work are stories, not numbers.  Making impact possible and not overwhelming, adding a bit of guilt at times, and making sure that the donors feel connected, appreciated, informed, special, and have opportunities to advance their own interests.  We all want to help our fellow human beings, but some things help us choose where our limited sources go.