Saved by the Bell and the limitless potential of generosity experiences

How many people do you meaningfully and consistently interact with in your life?

Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen were two sociologists who, in the 1950s, pioneered research on “acquaintanceship volume” — estimating the number of individuals people have in their social networks.?

In 1960, an MIT student looked at 86 days of President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment book and estimated that Roosevelt probably had about 22,500 acquaintances.

This is an approximate science, but further research into this question puts the acquaintances predicted after 20 years at?2,130. The more recent analysis of the size of social groups is by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, with the more widely cited number of 150 (147.8 to be precise) connections that the typical human can maintain simultaneously.

People's memories are very fickle, with other research by Daniel Kahneman indicating that we tend to only remember the peaks and valleys of experiences as opposed to the middling middle.

The Tori Paradox

In author and social critic Chuck Klosterman's book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, he outlines one of the most memorable essays on human relationships I've ever read and it has to do with the stupid 90s show Saved by the Bell.

In an utterly weird final season of the original run of the show, most episodes feature the regular six-member gang — Zack, Screech, Lisa, Slater, Jessie, and Kelly — and others feature just the first four and a new character named Tori (played by Leanna Creel), which kind of melds Jessie’s assertiveness with Kelly’s status as Zack’s love interest.

In real life, the Jessie and Kelly episodes were shot first and end with the high school graduation episode, but then NBC ordered more episodes. Actors Elizabeth Berkeley and Tiffani Thiessen declined to return, so the group was balanced with Tori. When the episodes aired, Jessie and Kelly episodes were interspersed with the Tori episodes, creating the suggestion that Jessie and Kelly are mutually exclusive from Tori, socially speaking, and that Jessie and Kelly are occasionally doing who-knows-what with whom-knows-whom, possibly in classrooms on the opposite side of the hallway that we never see.

What Klosterman does in a masterful unpacking of this dumb show is draw a line between the situation above and the reality of how social circles work. You don’t do everything with the same group of people, and some folks are present during memorable events, and others just aren’t. Depending on the size of your network overall, it may be possible that certain parts of your social groups would never meet.

Generosity Timelines

Let's take both of these parallel thought tracks and synthesize them into a practical way fundraisers can think about connections with their networks.

1. People have limits to managing the size of their networks, with the human brain putting aside more vital reserves for a finite amount of people
2. People also have fickle memories, likely misremembering details or situations that may influence their recall and emotions

The lesson to draw out is that you, as a fundraiser, must embrace that you have only a certain amount of time and energy in your body and brain to focus efforts. Your work is competing with all the other network-building happening in your life; major gift prospects are up against your daughter's new boyfriend, the old co-worker you ran into at the store, and the name of that actor from The Bear you were trying to remember at dinner last night.

What happens if I told you there was a way to remember everyone using technology and that if you invest just a little bit of time and money, your revenue dreams will wildly come true, just like magic?

Well, then I'd be overpromising because that isn't how technology ends up practically working.

However, technology plays a critical role in expanding the human's innate limits on connection-building. Utilizing a constituent-relationship-management (CRM) system enables fundraisers to work smarter, not harder.

I'm going to outline the top ways to approach your CRM with the right mindset and get the most out of its usage:

• The core reason you get a CRM is to manage details on people. So put into practice robust data management procedures and protocols to ensure that what goes into the database is valuable to your work in building connections and scaling revenue
• The typical nonprofit has to juggle three to five different data sources on their supporters alone, so what will you do about cutting that down in practice? The more splits you have in your unification of understanding around a person in your database, the higher likilood something negative will occur in their experience with your nonprofit
• The more work you do to manage the basics of people (e.g. just remembering their names) the less time you have to focus on personalizing things and making people feel you know something about them

Building on my posts from earlier this week that started with Tim Lockie and I discussing donor portals and then a great insight on building ROI data for events from Allison Sculley on my post about Origin Tracking features in our CRM, I'm going to draw out a cool feature that I've loved seeing grow

Our Timeline shows how a person has interacted with your nonprofit, not just for tracking money but also for communications and other engagement points. Using something like Zapier to do print-on-demand mailings? Or want to make a clear note about someone getting divorced so you have more details on what, on the surface, would look like robust household giving?

Timeline to the rescue!

However, the timeline only matters if something is happening on it. Empty timelines mean lacking opportunities or value in interacting with your nonprofit.

You, as a fundraiser, will have a limited ability to show meaningful love and connection with every person interested in your mission. As your organization gets larger, the reality is that retention rates will drop.

Building on your successes as your reach expands and the influence of your unique theory of change grows stronger, more positive generosity experiences will lead to stronger brand trust in your work.

I want to build upon the article above that I wrote a while ago, which focused on the intersection of brand reputation and people's generosity experiences.

Nonprofits do not have customer service departments. The work of a fundraiser is to not focus on donors and their feelings but on the donor's role in building a community of generosity. Does that mean we treat them like garbage and take their money while spitting on them?

No.

Does that mean we bow down to them and prioritize them above the work?

No.

This is the most critical conclusion I've come to when considering the term generosity experience.

Generosity is never focused on monetary contributions. Someone can be generous with their time, talent, or treasure.

Generosity is about building trust.

And trust is built through a community's experiences interacting with a nonprofit. It is different from the money given or even the programs performed. It is the aggregate of all those interactions. Designing an equitable and accessible generosity experience goes hand in hand with community-building. They are intertwined.

The core objective of Generosity Experience Design is to employ technology as a means to establish and nurture trust.

Technology can ensure that Tori gets to graduate from Bayside and party with the rest of the crew at The Max.

By embracing our limits, the technology can allow us to be limitless.