Future:Media:Change

What would happen if nonprofits joined the dark side of marketing spin and psychological persuasion that advertisers have been using for years?  Simple, we could save lives.  In an article from Outside Online, Nicholas Kristof outlines how nonprofits can save lives by embracing Fox News-eque tactics.

RECENT RESEARCH in social psychology offers a couple of central lessons. The first is a bit surprising: We intervene not because of stories of desperate circumstances but when we can be cheered up with positive stories of success and transformation.

Or, to put it another way, nobody gains more selfish pleasure than those who act selflessly.

the columns that perhaps generated the greatest response were those about Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman from a village in southern Punjab. Mukhtar is a rape victim who used compensation money to start a school, because she believes that education is the way to overcome the kind of attitudes that led to her rape.

Readers support her because she reflects a story of hope and triumph that makes them feel good.

Storytelling needs to focus on an individual, not a group. A classic experiment involved asking people to donate to help hungry children in West Africa. One group was asked to help a seven-year-old girl named Rokia, in the country of Mali. A second was asked to donate to help millions of hungry children. A third was asked to help Rokia but was provided with statistical information that gave them a larger context for her hunger. Not surprisingly, people donated more than twice as much to help Rokia as to help millions of children. But it turned out that even providing background information on African hun ger diminished empathy, so people were much less willing to help Rokia when she represented a broader problem. Donors didn’t want to help ease a crisis personi fied by a child; they just wanted to help one person—and to hell with the crisis

As we all vaguely know, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. As Mother Teresa said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Professor Slovic calls the first reaction “psychic numbing.”…Slovic found that our empathy begins to fade when the number of victims reaches just two. As he puts it: “The more who die, the less we care.”
Example, apartheid South Africa… never gained traction, however, until the organizers had the idea of refocusing it on an individual and came up with the slogan “Free Mandela!” Once there was a face on the movement, it resonated far more widely—and, ultimately, helped topple apartheid.

IT’S CLEAR THAT the philanthropic community hasn’t absorbed these lessons. When we want to get help, we make logical arguments about the scale of the suffering: Five million people have died in Congo! We make people feel guilty if they don’t help, rather than good if they do.

..come back not with stories of impoverished villages but rather ones about a particular 12-year-old girl who, if she received just $10 a month, could stay in school. Come back with photos of her—or, better, video that you put on a blog or Web site. Make people feel lucky that they have the opportunity to assist her, so that they’ll find helping her every bit as refreshing as, say, drinking a Pepsi.