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What I want to do is talk about just two forms of identity. One, there are lots of
different identities we have as human beings. Some of them are kind of tied intrinsically to us
because they're kind of a central part of us,
like gender identity, family identity, if you're a father or a mother, you have an identity as a
fundraiser, you have an identity as a leader of an organisation. All
these are identities that we have. So there are kind of those intrinsic identities
and then there are identities that we have that are important to us,
only when other people we know share those identities.
Now this is where this sort of notion of social identity comes from and
I'm going to talk about one kind of intrinsic identity
and I'm going to talk about social identity.
But I would start by talking about this notion of social identity. Now, what we're talking about here really is
am I likely to give you more as an organisation if
other people I know, also
get some benefit from the organisation or are also enthusiastic about the work that this
organisation is doing? And what I'm going to show you is a couple of experiments that we conducted
in the context of public radio in the United States. Public radio is a bit like the BBC, you get high quality news, good quality music,
but rather than it being funded through a licence fee, it's paid for by individual donors.
And what happens is that on air, there's an appeal,
people call in, and they call in to the station to make their gift
in response to these on-air appeals. And we got to play with
some of the scripts, that people were exposed to
and we also got to do a survey of some of these public radio donors.
So if I want to know about the size and the kind of social networks that you have and relate them to giving,
the easiest way of addressing that frankly is through research, and that's what we did. And what we found was
that the more people you know, broadly, who listen
to this public radio station, the higher the gift is that
you're likely to make. Now, if you look at that graph, it's a bit of a messy
graph and it's not linear, it kind of bounces round a bit.
But you get the sense that there's some kind of relationship going on there. So if I know more people
who also listen to, if you want to broaden it, to public radio who also benefit from the work of the organisation,
broadly speaking, I'm going to give to you but it's not an easy relationship to use at the moment for fundraising.
So what we might try and do perhaps is to nail down some of the things that are a bit vague on this
graph. So what do we mean by 'acquaintances'. Is that kind of co-workers, people we know in the conference,
or is that people that we are very close to, like our family and our immediate friends?
So if you want to tidy this up maybe we tighten that up . Equally, is it
'listen to,' or benefit from the work of the organisation
or is it 'might listen to' because I live in the area, 'could listen' to it
or again if you want to broaden it out of public radio, 'might benefit' from the work of the organisation.
And of course, that's easy to do with a test. And let's look at the first one first. Let's tidy-up this
notion of acquaintances. I hope you're taking notes because I shall test you on this presentation! What! Anyway,
For any conclusions I've given you, there are thousands of different variables
that can impact on giving, right, so you've got to account for those whenever you're trying to draw a conclusion
about that variable. Actually, all that matters on this headline is it's
family and friends that influence our behaviour, not
casual acquaintances, co-workers, people we know at conferences and so on. Family and friends we
pay attention to though, in our giving. So we tidy up that first
part of that sentence. We now know it's family and friends, not that broader network.
Right, let's look in a bit more detail at people
who benefit from the work of the organisation, people who
might benefit from the work of the organisation. In public radio speak, listeners
versus residents who could listen to the public
radio station. So what did we do? Well, we set up a telephone script where people would call
in. Any time you do experiments you have to have a control group
where they get nothing, so thanks for calling, how much do you want to contribute today? Take the credit card information, goodbye! That's it.
In the experimental condition, "can I ask how many of your family and friends also listen to
this public radio station?" Or,
"can I ask how many of your family and friends also live in
this public radio area? How much would you like to contribute today?...
***. What did we find? Well we found that
the average gift in the control condition, where they're not given any
of that other information at all, here is about $145, something like that.
That's the black line in the middle of that graph. When you talk to people about how many other people you know who
live in the area, could benefit from the work of the organisation
you're on that blue line. You'll see that the blue line is pretty similar to the control group and in fact, there's no real effect there at all.
So knowing lots of people who might benefit from the work for the organisation
ain't going to impact on my giving behaviour. But look what happens to the average gift size when we start talking to people about
other people they know who benefit from the work of the organisation,
who listen to their local public radio station.
And then you're on the red line. Now that's good news because
you can increase the level of the average ...