Speaker 1: What up YouTube? Salvador Brinkman here. Welcome back to the Crowdfunding Demystified YouTube channel, and today we're talking about for the nonprofits out there in the audience, for the charities out there, if you're listening to this video right now, how to get people to give money to your cause, how to get people to give money to your nonprofit crowdfunding campaign, your online fundraiser, even your in-person fundraiser, quite frankly, we're going to go through scientifically how you can get people to care, to give money, and to then, of course, become evangelists for your nonprofit. To get started, I want to talk about a study that was conducted in the form of charity giving. This is actually a psychological study that I'm going to link to down below, so you can check it out and you can verify all of my claims here. Basically, the question is, what gets someone to give money? What's actually happening in the brain when someone decides to say, yeah, I want to give money to a charity? What these researchers did was they told two people. Two different stories to a group of research participants. Now, the first story that they told went something like this. There's a young boy who has cancer. He's had to have chemotherapy treatments, and it was very difficult for him, but eventually he got over that successful chemotherapy treatment, but at the same time, there's something that's lingering in the background. He loves ... He's really happy that he's now feeling better. He's playing with his toys, but his father looks down from the window at his son who's playing with his toys. He sees him, so happy, but at the same time, in the back of his mind, the father knows that the child is dying. He knows that in the next six months, in the next year, for the sake of, let's just say, Toby is going to die, and unfortunately, it's just the condition that he's in, that just because of the disease, the ailment that he has, even though they had chemotherapy treatment, the father knows in the back of his head that this kid, this poor kid, is going to die. The father finds it so difficult to play with the kid, to play with his son. When he has this knowledge and to be happy, knowing that this is going to be the eventual end and it's going to happen very soon. Now, Toby is looking up at his father, and he's smiling, and he's just in the moment and enjoying and having a happy time and playing with his toys. His father thinks to himself, and how crazy it is that life is so transient, and all of our lives are very short, but that we get to spend these few precious moments with the people that we care about. Almost in that moment, because of the story. In the story that was told to these research participants, the father almost is feeling the emotional weight of this experience, but actually the child is the one that's going through the experience. The father feels like he is dying, the emotions of what you would feel like if you were dying, but at the same time, the child doesn't feel that. The father has such a high empathy with the child that the father feels like he himself is dying along with the kid. Now when they conducted this study, and it's kind of a depressing story. When they conducted this study, a few different things happened. First of all, they measured a few different things like the hormonal response. They went on to do series of studies. They studied other things like the skin's conductance. They studied what happens with your breathing. They studied what happens with your fMRI scan, or the functional magnetic resonant imaging with your brain. How is your brain lighting up? They did a few different things, and they found that first of all, cortisol was released. That's a good thing. When people were listening to and watching this story. That lead to a feeling of distress. The other thing that was released was oxytocin, sorry my spelling here kind of sucks, which was also released the feeling of empathy. So people, when they watched or they heard this story, were feeling distress and empathy. They were feeling distress because of the emotions that the father was feeling. feeling, also the knowledge of the horrible things that the boy has had to go through that he's going to go through in the future, and empathy because of seeing and hearing this father talk about his son, we can all, in the story format, we can all put ourselves in the shoes of that father and feel a similar degree of emotions of, oh man, if I was in that situation, I imagine how I could feel if my son was going through that. So they were feeling distress and empathy after hearing that story. After hearing the story, they were also asked by the researchers, would you like to give money? Would you like to give money to someone else in the study, or would you like to give money to a cause that helps children with different ailments or illnesses? Would you be willing to give money? And an overwhelming majority of the people who are part of this study decided to give money to help kids with illnesses. Okay. Okay. Okay. This story made them feel these things, and as a result, they decided to give money to help with a cause that is similar to the story, or to help with kids who are similar to Toby, who are going through an experience just like this. So the researchers were like, huh, that's actually, that's really interesting. It's kind of cool that people are willing to actually reach out and help other people, but let's just see if that's kind of a phenomenon. Let's do a control experiment. So what they did with the control experiment is they told a story. They told a story about a child and his father, but rather than having the traditional story format of a beginning, a middle, conflict, and then the end, and the emotions that the people are feeling, and going through this almost story arc, they just kind of had a day-to-day, in-the-life, kind of just boring story. And what they found was that there weren't any kind of releases of these different hormones. When they did the fMRI scan, people were just kind of tuned out. They weren't really paying attention. They found it to be boring, quite frankly, like they were just not interested. They're just kind of looking around. So the researchers found that when they put this information in a story format, it got people to care and feel distress and to have empathy, leading them to give money. When they actually did this in a not story format, it was just boring. People couldn't relate. They weren't really interested, and they were just overall unengaged. Now here comes the interesting part about this psychological study. So they had already determined this. They also had done multiple experiments. They had a control experiment. So it's pretty clear that these signs are associated with giving. But the question is, can you actually predict this? If you have a patient, or if you have a research participant, and they're feeling these things, does this mean you can predict that they are going to give money? This is kind of the interesting part of the study. So what they did is, they beefed up the experiment. So in addition to just measuring hormones, they also measured stuff like... they took blood, they took respiration, they took skin conductance, they did heart rates, and lastly, they had an fMRI. So all this stuff, you know, science-y stuff, was able for them to basically way more accurately determine is someone feeling the emotion of distress, and is someone feeling the emotion of empathy? Are they connected with the person? Are they feeling the similar emotions as the people? Yeah. So they took all these different things, and then they showed a group of participants this story. And after that point, they then said, okay, we're going to predict whether or not, based on these signals, is someone going to give money? And they made that prediction. And after that prediction, they then obviously gave them the chance, and of those people, they could predict with 80% accuracy whether or not someone would give money to a charity or a cause based off of feeling these emotions and then giving money to a charity that alleviated children's sickness or illness. So think about that, 80% accuracy. This is the formula to get people to give money online, in person, wherever. This is the formula that you can use, and you can apply to your own corporate giving, to your own online giving, online donations, whatever, in order to get people to care, to connect with your target demographic, to connect with your team, and then get them to actually support it financially. So if that sounds cool to you, I want to explore how to tangibly do this. How to tangibly act on this knowledge, and also some of the other psychological triggers, if you will, that can get people to give money, that can get them into the frame of wanting to give money, and to actually make them care about your charity, your nonprofit, your cause, whatever it is. So below, down below in this YouTube description, I'm going to link to a link that will take you to the pre-launch of an upcoming book that I have that goes through the psychological tactics that nonprofits can use to actually get people to donate money to their cause. It's a really interesting book, and if you found that to be interesting, you're going to love this book that I'm coming out with. All you got to do, enter your name and email, get on the interest list, and when it comes out on Amazon, I'll be sure to share it with you. This is your psychological trick. This is your psychological hack or psychological triggers, if you will, that get people to say yes to giving money. Now, I just want to really quickly, so that you're left with something here you can take action on, I really want to quickly just give you a few nuggets or a few bullet points to pay attention to. So the first one is, the first thing you should take away from this whole experiment that people conducted is the power of story. If you are not already wrapping your ask in a story, you need to do that. Because story gets people to care, and it gets them to feel empathy. It gets them to feel negative emotions, and I don't mean this in a manipulative way, I just mean every story does. Have you ever watched, I watched Crazy Rich Asians the other weekend, and there were moments when I wanted to, you know, I was having like a tear coming out of my eye. It's a really emotional movie. You haven't seen Crazy Rich Asians? Go and see it. It's a great movie. But there were times where, like, I was feeling negative emotions. Because the characters were going under such incredible things and obstacles, and it's so cool to watch that on screen that I was starting to tear up. Like, I was starting to feel the emotions that the characters were feeling. So story is an incredible way to get people to care, feel empathy, and feel negative emotions. The next big thing you should take away is that you have to then have a ask, or you have to have a cause that relates to the story. So by basically giving money. That person is going to help alleviate the people that are talked about in the story. So this, we can say a cause here. Basically people are going to relate with the characters and the story that you have, the target demographic. The ask has to be for giving money to an initiative, a charity, or a cause that is going to help those people. I know it sounds very simple, but you'd be surprised by the number of nonprofits that get this wrong. They don't sync up. They don't sync up their story messaging with the people that they're going to help. They don't sync up the story with their actual ask. It's kind of disjointed in that way. So the second thing you should take away is the ask should be related to that. The third thing is to actually think about what is it that the act of giving money does to your brain. Now, it's kind of deep here, but stay with me. The act of giving money, when someone is in a state of distress, they're feeling negative emotions as a result of this story. They're almost thinking like, man, I just want to help. I feel so bad for this person right now. I just want to help. Like in the example with Toby, I feel so bad for this kid and his father. I just want to help. Can we give money? Can we help in some way? By giving money, this is a really subtle thing that no one will really tell you about, but they're actually feeling it deep within. It's alleviating distress. What do I mean by that? I mean by giving money. Giving money, it then allows that person to say, wow, at least I did something. You're like, okay, that was a really bad ... Man, that was horrible, but I'm giving money. I feel like a good person. At least I did something. At least I'm helping in some way. It allows them to almost get past this feeling of distress and now to be okay and go about their day. They've remedied this problem, this negative emotion in their mind by giving money. Now they're in a state of positivity and happiness because they feel like they're helping out the world. They're helping out the people that were causing this distress, the person who's in this horrible situation, the target demographic, whatever it is. They also just feel good because this is a way to alleviate and process that negative emotion that they felt. Now I have to stress here, guys, do not use this in manipulative ways. Don't be that person who's putting a really manipulative advertisement or something like that. It should only be used to help people that are genuinely in need. It should only be used to help people that are genuinely in need. It should only be used in such a way that you're also treating your donors with the respect that they deserve and you're following them up with updates. You don't want to emotionally manipulate people or something like that. These are just the psychological hacks and triggers that I want to share with you that I'm entrusting to you that you're going to use to positively impact the world. That sounds cool to you. Go and check out the link down below. Get on the pre-order list for my upcoming book. I share way more information out there and I also have the psychological study that I talked about in this video. I'll link to that down below. My name is Sal. I put out content on crowdfunding, on fundraising. I get really into psychology and marketing and sales and all that kind of stuff. That sounds interesting to you. Be sure to subscribe to this YouTube channel and turn on notifications. It's been awesome. Again, my name is Sal and I'll see you next time.