The Neuroscience of Trauma-Informed Fundraising with Cherian Koshy

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In This Episode

Urgency has become standard practice in fundraising. But what happens when an appeal moves beyond communicating genuine need and begins to create stress or pressure? And could those tactics actually make donors less likely to act?

For years, fundraisers have been taught that urgency is essential to motivating generosity. These practices have become so familiar that we rarely stop to question why they work, whether they always work, or what they might be costing us. And for those working to bring more ethical and trauma-informed practices into fundraising, there's often a lingering concern: Will a more thoughtful approach still help us meet our goals?

In this episode of When Bearing Witness, I sit down with Cherian Koshy, USA Today bestselling author of Neurogiving and Vice President at Kindsight, to explore what neuroscience and psychology can teach us about how people respond to fundraising appeals.

Our conversation challenges some long-held assumptions about what motivates donors and invites us to think more deeply about the experience we're creating for the people we're asking to give.

Because effective fundraising shouldn't have to come at the expense of trust, safety, or autonomy.

About Cherian Koshy

Cherian Koshy, ACFRE, CFRE, CAP®, is a USA Today bestselling author of Neurogiving and Vice President at Kindsight. He serves on the global board of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and on the board of The Giving Institute. His insights have been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, CEOWorld, and Yahoo Finance.

Connect with Cherian Koshy

Cherian’s website |  Neurogiving Lab Notes

Connect with Maria

Speaking & Training | LinkedIn | Email 

Transcript

Maria: Cherian, it is such a gift to have you here.

Cherian: Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me. I've been such a fan of your podcast, and I'm just thrilled that I get to be part of it.

Maria: Yeah. This book is a gift to the sector, but it's particularly a gift to those of us in the trauma-informed and ethical fundraising and storytelling movement. Because so often we are asked for the receipts. We know we should do this, but are we still going to reach our fundraising goals? And so many of us are like, "Can't we just do this because it's the right thing to do?"

Cherian: Yeah.

Maria: Which doesn't seem to be enough. But I'm realizing, and this is why I'm just so grateful for this book, that a lot of trauma-informed practices are also best practices in storytelling, fundraising, and marketing, and there's more and more research to support these practices.

So again, I'm in the process of writing the book When Bearing Witness, and this will be such an important guide for me as I'm not just saying what we should do to resist harm in our storytelling and fundraising, but why this actually will still support our fundraising goals.

So before we get into the science, tell us a little bit more about your winding journey in the nonprofit space.

Cherian: First of all, let me just say it means a lot that you said that. I do a lot of podcasts, and a lot of people talk about the tactical part of fundraising, which I don't mind talking about because obviously that's a thing.

But it was very intentional that I put ethics throughout the book and then made ethics a very significant part of certain chapters. So much so that some of the editors were like, "This is too much. We need to get rid of this." And I was like, "No, this is really essential."

And it comes back to, like a lot of people, I was an accidental fundraiser. Next year will be my 30th year in fundraising.

And I really quickly became fascinated by the human side of the work. Why would someone hear a story and immediately want to help, and then another person who maybe cared just as deeply would hesitate or not engage in the same way?

So over the years, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of different organizations in education and healthcare and the arts and workforce development, and raised whatever monies.

But like a lot of fundraisers, I initially learned through trial and error. I went to conferences, I listened to people speak and read books and whatnot. And I think people said these best practice things and said, "I use this in my shop. You should use this, too."

And they said, "This is what worked for me," and we knew that it must have worked for them. "We told this story or we tried to do this type of ask and created this deadline," or whatever.

And there wasn't a whole lot of explanation as to why that worked or when it stopped working, and why those tactics produced radically different results for different people. So that gap became really impossible for me to ignore as I got deeper into my work and leading teams and whatnot.

So I started studying behavioral science and psychology and neuroscience and decision science, and what I found fundamentally changed my understanding of my own work and fundraising in general.

It wasn't donors who were these reluctant people that we needed to cajole and convince to do something that they didn't want to do and persuade into generosity, but rather that generosity is this inherently biological need that we have, and this, I would say, social inheritance that we have. And our job is to remove the fear and the friction and the threat that's preventing generosity from becoming action.

And that's the idea that first of all came into some speaking and some webinars and some conference presentations that I did. And then Wiley approached me and said, "Hey, would you be willing to do a book?"

And I said, "This is what I've been speaking on. I'd be willing to do something like that."

So that's what Neurogiving became. And it's the book that I wish I had as a fundraiser because it's the why behind the what. It replaces the "Here's the tactic that's supposed to work" with "Here's what might be happening inside the brain of the person making the decision, and here's really the peer-reviewed science. Here's the evidence around that."

I like to say I spent the first really significant portion of my career learning how to make an ask and how to write appeals and all of those types of things, and I spent the last few years, the last 10%, trying to learn how people actually make decisions.

Maria: That resonates so deeply, and I was just talking to someone about this earlier today because I've been a nonprofit marketing educator for the past eight years.

And so often, as educators, we just copy and paste concepts and tactics, right? And then they live on. And one of these things is urgency.

We've decided that urgency is a template, is a tactic, when we are doing nonprofit communications and fundraising communications.

However, in Neurogiving, you write that if an appeal creates too much stress, it can actually interfere with people's ability to act on their empathy, which is so important that we go back and we understand the why behind these tactics that we just perpetuate for years and years.

So tell us, what is happening in the brain when we cross that line from motivating someone to actually overwhelming them?

Cherian: So some amount of motivation can encourage us to move towards another person, but distress actually causes us to want to escape that feeling.

It can be helpful that it directs and focuses our brain and says, "Hey, this matters. This is important. Focus on this." That's why genuine urgency in some cases can and does work.

But that relationship is not a linear relationship. It's not like more urgency, more focus, more brain attention at all times. It doesn't automatically produce more attention.

Under uncontrollable stress, the brain becomes more focused and more oriented around the threat and self-protection.

And there's really good research that I don't even think is in the book by Amy Arnsten, and there are other folks who talk about this as well. But in high-stress environments, it weakens your decision functions, right? Things like your working memory and your reasoning and your decision-making, all of those types of things.

And let's be clear, the donor still cares. The donor cares about what's happening.

But caring and acting are not the same neurological event. These are two different things.

So if we evoke these really powerful emotions through storytelling and then give someone a really complicated form or an ambiguous solution or an overwhelming problem that they just can't wrap their head around, we've created this sort of motivation without a path forward.

I also want to address the thing that you mentioned around empathy, because there's this fine line between empathetic concern and personal distress.

So empathetic concern is other-focused. I care about you, Maria. I want you to be okay. Personal distress is self-focused. I can't bear what I'm feeling. And research really finds that empathetic concern predicts helping. I want to do something about that.

But personal distress is associated with avoidance.

So we really see that play out in what I would call essentially compassion fatigue. I want to be clear, not donor fatigue, compassion fatigue, where people anticipate this suffering will overwhelm them and impose an unmanageable emotional cost on them, like emotional trauma.

So they regulate their feelings downward before they fully engage with the activity or the person. And this is proven out through a lot of different experiments that are out there. Folks can look at that.

So here's what I want to bottom-line for folks. The objective is not to eliminate emotion. That would be terrible, because emotion is the precursor, I would argue, to any sort of decision-making.

So emotion's essential. It's to convert or to think about how emotion drives to agency or action.

So show me a real person who's consented to their story being told and is part of that process. Help me understand what exactly is happening, and then let me see something that I can realistically do now.

So open the door to generosity, but don't overwhelm them so that they're looking for, "How do I get out of this situation?"

Maria: That's really fascinating because I talk a lot, and this is more qualitative, about how these messages stay in the body.

And even if you do give a one-time gift, and you don't understand subconsciously why every time I get this newsletter or see a social media post, I feel bad, like something in my... [Unclear / incomplete thought]

And our body holds on to these negative associations. We have to be really careful during times of crisis to balance urgency and the realities.

Because like you said, we don't need to be, we cannot be void of emotion and humanity. But there is that line, or you get to that certain point where you don't even realize that you're developing these negative associations with this cause.

Cherian: Yep, absolutely. And I talk a lot with fundraisers all the time, whether in big groups or with specific nonprofits, about whether they're being truly intentional about the words that they're choosing, or if it's coming out without them thinking about it, and how donors are processing that in their brains and in their bodies.

And so what you said is absolutely correct, that words carry so much meaning, and they can truly impact whether the brain is open to the discussion or not, or whether they've already closed down the discussion entirely.

And that gating, if you will, can happen with the turn of a phrase.

Maria: Absolutely. And also because today in storytelling, we do audio, we do video. Video just can bring up so much.

I bring this up a lot, and I always give a content warning when I talk about the NICU or anything pediatric. But if I watch a video and there's beeping monitors and there's a child with wires around them, I cannot get to the call to action because I'm so dysregulated, because my daughter was in the NICU for the first week of her life.

And this is where your research and trauma, it's really interesting because, yes, compassion fatigue, but also what lived trauma prevents that call to action from meeting.

But also not just lived trauma, also vicarious trauma, generational trauma, which I find fascinating, where someone's like, "Why do I have such a hard time receiving messages about food insecurity?"

And maybe that is sitting in your body because three generations back dealt with severe food insecurity. You don't even know what might be happening in your body that prevents you from receiving these messages.

Cherian: And if you don't know your audience, you're just sending these stories out into the void hoping that they'll land.

And this is really my point about my origin story. We're sending out these stories thinking the stories are good to us, but then we find out, "Oh no, they don't land at all with this particular group of people or this particular person." And we don't really know why.

And it's because of everything that you just mentioned, right?

We just didn't know how they were reacting to that because of any one of these traumas or because of what words we chose, what video, what images, what sounds. All these things that we just were not intentional about.

Maria: And they all matter deeply.

Cherian: Absolutely right.

Maria: Which to me, it's like, foundationally, we need to slow down with our storytelling to take all these things into account.

I want to talk about psychological reactance, which you talk about in your book, which I find to be really fascinating.

So tell us a little bit about psychological reactance and what happens when a donor starts to feel like an organization is cornering them into giving instead of allowing them natural agency?

Cherian: So psychological reactance is the phenomenon that is our response to a threat to autonomy.

So we both have kids. If you tell a kid, "You have to do this," their immediate response is, "I don't." "I'm going to dig in and not do this thing."

That is our natural response to a reduction in autonomy. We want to restore freedom that we think that we're losing. Everyone does this all the time.

So for parents out there, if you've ever said, "You have to do this," this is unsolicited parenting advice. Even if your intention is that they really do have to do this, those words are autonomy-reducing.

And in the brain of your child, the child's brain says, "I want to protect my freedom. I am going to do the opposite. I'm going to think the opposite, even if I'm complying for a time."

In the brain of an adult, their brain just says, "No, I'm going to find ways out of this."

So in fundraising, the restoration of autonomy can take a lot of different forms. Some people might say no, but I actually think that's a gift.

I think if someone says no, you're like, "Okay, great, I can move on."

What I often say is that the enemy of good fundraising is not no, it's not now.

Because you have a donor who's like, "I still care about this cause, but I want to restore my autonomy. I still want to maintain it, so I'm going to delay that decision. I'm going to defer the decision. I'm going to say I'll decide later."

And that's what happens to so many people.

It also shows up when donors are ghosting you, when they just don't respond to a text message or a phone call or an email. Maybe they unsubscribe, whatever it might be, right? All of those different phenomena.

So I want to be clear, they might even agree in the moment, but they feel this inherent resentment afterwards.

And the fundraiser, because you don't know that resentment that happened in their body or in their brain, you record this as a positive signal, or you record this as a yes.

But the donor remembers it as coercion.

And so this is really functionally why attrition occurs, why donors don't give again. In the brain, it functionally occurs because someone's brain argues or they have reticence to what is happening to them.

So instead of thinking about the person that's in that story or that's being impacted by the organization and the work that's being done and all of that, the donor is starting to generate responses to why the appeal is unfair, is exaggerated, is manipulated, all of these things.

And there's a ton of evidence around this as well, not only in the book but elsewhere, that says that this impacts how people view the appeal itself and view the person who's making that appeal.

So coming back to what we were just talking about, this is why language matters so, so much.

So if you say something like, "You can prevent this tragedy, and you have to act now," that carries a very deliberate and different psychological signal from, "If this is something that you want to help change, what your gift can make possible today."

We can both communicate need, but only one of those tries to essentially appropriate the donor's response.

Those are both asking for a gift, but they're doing so in very different autonomy-reducing or autonomy-protecting forms.

And maybe those are not perfect ones, right? But that's off the top of my head.

But the point is, a donor who is defending their freedom isn't imagining their own generosity, isn't thinking about their own impact.

Maria: Maria Rio calls it the go-away gift.

Cherian: Oh, I love that. Yes.

Maria: And I love that example of how you can phrase it in a way that doesn't give autonomy, because you do get that feeling of, "How do I get rid of this anxiety and stress and guilt? Let me just give, but go away."

And at least, like, this is just so overwhelming and doesn't feel good.

Another thing that I want to mention is that there's a lot of pillars of being trauma-informed, but I just teach two, and that is safety and autonomy.

And I bring this up a lot in trauma-informed fundraising because we really do think that if we don't have language that communicates urgency, that it won't come naturally.

Cherian: Sure.

Maria: And we just don't realize how that can backfire.

Have you, in your research, found how natural urgency arises?

You gave a really good example, but I have a hard time articulating through a research lens or science, again, it's just more qualitative, how humans are capable of creating their own natural urgency around causes.

Cherian: So there is real urgency, right? And urgency works because it's a signal to the brain that says, "Hey, this situation over here is unusual. It's important. It's time-sensitive."

But those signals only work... I'm a child of the '80s, right? Where in Sesame Street we were told, "One of these things is not like the others. One of these things isn't the same."

That's how urgency is supposed to function. This is different. Pay attention to this.

So it only works when it is not normal and it's exceptional as a circumstance.

But if every campaign is critical, and every deadline is midnight, and every month represents some existential crisis, then donors become acclimated or attenuated to learning that this is how you communicate, and this is how the organization talks.

Urgency becomes noise, not signal.

So that's the challenge in how, I would say, not just a single organization, the whole industry has used this psychological principle to our own failing.

Everybody's like, "You have to respond. You have to respond. You have to respond by midnight," and, "This is so important. It's the worst circumstance of whatever."

And don't get me wrong, there's real urgency out there, but then we've added this concept of false scarcity.

Donors understand that deadlines are movable, and the match wasn't meaningful, or that final appeal wasn't real, and there's going to be six more appeals.

And it changes their belief about the organization and the messenger. And then when there's a new genuine emergency, they've got to deal with this credibility deficit that occurs.

So I don't want this to sound like the crying wolf nursery fairy tale that we've been told.

It's more nuanced than that because it doesn't actually mean that we ignore future warnings, because people are compassionate. People do care about what's happening.

But what is real is that it impairs their decision-making. It does change how they think about whether to act.

And the reality is we just need to be transparent about what is really urgent. Obviously avoid false scarcity. There's a huge component of that.

And the thing that's interesting, we've also created this sort of cumulative identity cost.

So if all of these interactions make the donor feel anxious and guilty, and that emotional state becomes associated not only with the organization but with giving as a concept.

I mentioned to you before we started, I was in Kentucky last week, and I was sitting with Alice Ferris, and she was like, "I had to reread this chapter about urgency a few times."

She said, "I didn't think it meant anything to me, but then I realized what you were actually saying."

And I was like, "I don't know if I realized what I was actually saying, so cool."

But the point is that when so many actual bad things are happening, all of these urgent things that are happening, donors are seeing the federal government do these things, and rescission happening in public media, and people losing staff benefits.

All these things happen. There are real crises that are happening from everywhere.

The reality is they're feeling this cumulative identity cost, right? They're feeling anxious and guilty and inadequate, and that state is affecting them.

Eventually, avoiding a particular organization might be a reality, but avoiding those feelings entirely might be the result of that.

They just say, "I'm going to opt out of this because I'm just overwhelmed by everything that's happening right now, and I don't know what that looks like."

To reiterate, there's real clear science on the fact that manufactured urgency is problematic, and it doesn't just spend our attention capability, it spends credibility.

But we're living in an era that massively impacts everyone's understanding of what urgency and scarcity looks like.

Maria: I had a dear mentor that always said, "If everything's important, nothing's important. So if everything's urgent, nothing is urgent."

So what would you say to folks about that balance in your communications so that when things are urgent or when the ask comes around, folks do feel like this is the time to act?

Cherian: That's a great question, and a really important question given the circumstances that we're in.

I would say that in a real disaster or time-sensitive situation, organizations shouldn't soften the truth. People deserve to know the seriousness of what's actually happening.

The ethical distinction lies in whether or not we're informing the donor's judgment or we're trying to overwhelm it so that they don't ask more questions.

So I would consider building an emergency appeal around four things: truth, specificity, efficacy, and agency.

So truth being the first bedrock principle. Are the facts proportionate to the situation? That's got to be foundationally true.

Specificity means are we explaining what has changed and why timing matters?

And assuming we're being truthful about that, then that's clear.

Efficacy is about showing how the organization has a credible response and how the donor's action can truly help in that circumstance.

And then agency means leaving that decision with the donor.

So if you say something like, "Flooding has impacted 400 families since yesterday. Our local team can open up an additional shelter tonight if we raise $50,000 by 6:00 PM," or, "Your gift of $100 can ensure food and bedding for a single family. If you'd like to help, you can give here, and we'll report back tomorrow on what was raised and what we actually deployed."

The wording there is not perfect, but in general, there's an emergency situation. The flood happened. Here's how much we need to raise to be able to do this thing. Your $100 can do this specific thing. We'll let you know what we were able to do.

The urgency belongs to the situation.

It identifies a need, the deadline, what our plan is, how we're going to affect it, and there's some accountability there, all of that.

What I would say is the research on this is really helpful because we want to be clear about all of these pieces and reaffirm all of that to the donor to say, "This is serious. Something can be done, and you can be part of this if you want to be part of it."

So that's how I would shape it.

And just as a reminder, we know that we're manipulating people if we're trying to prevent them from asking more questions. If we want them to just act without interrogating or wanting to know more details.

Maria: That's going to stick with me. That's really interesting.

And I think that's what the balance of educating on the reality and that ask allows people to make informed decisions instead of, "I have to give now," and there's just no time to actually ask questions because this is such a disaster.

Cherian: And if you look back historically at where bad decisions have occurred and where manipulation has occurred, that's the litmus test.

There are all these instances where we want you to make this decision quickly so that you skip a step, right? That's the key.

The key is we make this decision quickly so that you don't look over here and you don't evaluate this critical piece.

And so from my perspective, donors are smart about this, but you as the fundraiser, as the nonprofit, should hold this as a line and say, "We're not going to cut corners. We're not going to put this on the playing field. We're not ever going to be in a situation where we're telling a donor or a stakeholder or anybody, you have to make a decision right now and not critically interrogate this."

You can at any point critically interrogate anything that we do. Totally fine.

And if you decide to give tomorrow, we're here for that, or next week or next month, totally fine.

Maria: You know what kind of my takeaway from that is? What if in our appeals we ended with, "If you have any questions, reply."

Cherian: Yeah.

Maria: Which is something, like from a sales perspective, when I'm launching When Bearing Witness, I'm like, "Here's the Q&A. These are what people ask. Here are answers, but if you have a question I didn't answer, reply."

It's a trauma-informed sales approach, right?

But that absolutely works in fundraising. Like, why don't we do that? Why don't we say, "If you have questions about what's going on or where this money will go, ask. Ask, we're happy to answer you."

Cherian: And I think there's this sort of, and I was going to say I don't mean to put down these people who think that fundraising is sales, but I do mean to put them down.

There's this whole sales mentality of this presumptive close of "When you give this," whatever.

The problem with that in a lot of ways is that it tries to avoid people asking a question that they may have had in the back of their mind.

And our goal at all times should be to answer the question that they may have had, make them feel very confident about the decision that they're making.

Because we want them to feel good about the decision, and ideally, we want them to make the decision again, or at the very least, tell other people that they made that decision.

So anytime we're like, "Hey, you've got to make the decision by this time. We've got to make the decision by this time. We need this money right now."

Essentially the subtext of that is, "Don't think about it. Just write the check," right? Just press the button and it'll all work out. It'll all be good.

Maria: Trust us.

Cherian: That creates this defensiveness on the part of the donor, the reactance on the part of the donor to be like, "Something's fishy here."

Maria: Absolutely. So the trauma-informed storytelling and fundraising movement is rewriting the script. It's unlearning and relearning. Again, part of this journey is starting over.

So for fundraisers who are reconsidering how they communicate with donors after reading Neurogiving, what would you hope that they would reconsider?

Cherian: First of all, you are way more of the expert on this than I am, so I would point them to you.

But what I would reaffirm of what you already said is that a trauma-informed approach begins with the awareness of people bringing their histories into the interaction that we can't see.

So like you said, the image, the story, the content can have a very different effect on someone that's experienced violence or displacement or poverty or illness or whatever.

And our job is not to diagnose a donor, but we can design communications that provide safety, that provide transparency, that allow donors to opt out of certain types of communication.

So that could be, as you mentioned, giving a brief note before material that preserves dignity or agency of the person whose story is being told, or the audience members, so they know what to expect.

Explaining why the donor is receiving that message. So that all of these things are covered that we don't necessarily think about.

Letting donors choose the communication frequency, giving them an easy way to authentically say not now, right?

Not using not now as a defensive mechanism, but authentically say, "This is not the right time for me."

That's totally different than a go-away gift.

The other thing that I would say is offering people more than one way of participation.

And this is my challenge with what we talk about in the sector right now, like all generosity is money. That's one way of participating. Giving dollars is one way of participating.

But there's volunteering, there's sharing, there's talking to an elected official. There's coming back when the time is right.

There are so many ways of engaging with the cause.

Choice shouldn't be used to clutter the appeal, but it can be used to demonstrate that the relationship is more than just give us money by December 31st, right?

That's the thing that I would come back to.

And in the book, I talk about self-determination theory, which is really important, that describes how autonomy is fundamental to people's psychological needs alongside competence and relatedness.

And so this is core to how people think about themselves, and identity is, I would say, essential to generosity decisions.

So when people are supported in their autonomy and their identity, it doesn't mean that you're being passive in fundraising.

It's just recognizing that person's perspective, knowing where they're coming from, and providing them meaningful options in how their participation could be appropriate, legitimate choices for them, and avoiding controlling pressure upon them.

Knowing that their brain works in certain ways and aligning it with how their brain thinks.

So I think fundamentally this is the realization that I came to. This changes our definition of what a good ask is.

A good ask is not this platonic single version of what a good ask is.

A good ask is one that decreases the threat response of the donor and makes refusal less psychologically painful.

It's one that allows the donor to make an informed, values-aligned yes that is psychologically easy.

I would say that autonomy is what reinforces that a gift is a gift.

Maria: Cherian, again, I'm so grateful for this book. It has become a resource in the When Bearing Witness program.

For all those asking for receipts, there's research out there that these trauma-informed and ethical practices aren't going to water down your messaging.

They're not going to reduce the chances of you reaching your goal. They support productive fundraising, which is just wonderful for me to learn and hear this year as I've been challenged with folks asking me, "I want to do this, but I don't think leadership's going to buy it because it goes against what we've been doing for decades and decades."

So again, thank you. Thank you for this book and this work.

How can listeners connect with you, and how can they grab their copy of Neurogiving?

Cherian: I think the easiest place to find me is probably online. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. That's where I do most of my work.

But my goal, honestly, with this is that people like you take the work and make it their own. They do something different with it than I even anticipated.

So I really genuinely enjoy hearing how people modify it, whatever.

So if people want to reach out and see how that can happen, that's great.

You can buy the book wherever books are sold.

And if anyone has questions about it, like we talked about before, I'd love to hear those questions as well.

So feel free to reach out either through my website or through social media and let me know how it's going for you, because I'd really be inclined to hear that as well.

Maria: We'll have all those links in the show notes.

Cherian, this has been a joy talking to you, so thank you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Cherian: Thanks again for having me, and thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation that feeds my soul.