Charity Officials Must Get Over "Curse of Knowledge" to Raise More Money, Scholar Says

By Elizabeth Schwinn

Charity officials too often fail to clearly convey the importance of their work to potential

ALSO SEE: AUDIO: The Chronicle's Elizabeth Schwinn interviews Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. (Photograph by Amy Surdacki)

donors and other outsiders, says an organizational-behavior professor at Stanford University.

The professor, Chip Heath, said at the annual meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals held here this week, that fund raisers and other nonprofit leaders can stimulate gifts and assistance if they can learn to convey messages that are "sticky," meaning that people not only understand the charity's message when they hear it, but also remember it later.

The problem for charity leaders, who are often experts in their fields, is that they fall prey to "the curse of knowledge," Mr. Heath says: The more they know about a subject the less capable they are of explaining it to outsiders. They become fascinated by "complexity and nuance," he says, but simplicity is the best way to reach people unfamiliar with a topic.

Often that means people outside an organization can better describe its work than people within the charity, Mr. Heath says. At a recent seminar, the head of the Norton Priory Museum in Cheshire, England told other nonprofit officials that the museum's mission was "to care for the historic sites of Norton Priory for future generations and to make them accessible for people to enjoy and learn from."

Pressed for details, the official described Norton Priory as a microcosm of 800 years of English history, Mr. Heath says, with records so detailed they even listed what people ate for breakfast each day in centuries past.

Another participant then summed up the museum's mission, Mr. Heath says: "It's history without a book."

"You could feel an ahh of appreciation sweep the room," Mr. Heath recalls.

Concrete Details

Charity leaders who can move away from abstract concepts to concrete details can reach donors more easily, Mr. Heath says.

For instance, the California chapter of the Nature Conservancy had trouble persuading donors of the need to conserve regions of the state that had "microclimates," small areas where the climate was different than the surrounding region. Then the Nature Conservancy assigned names to each one: The anonymous brown hills above Stanford, for example, were called the "Mt. Hamilton wilderness." The name stuck, Mr. Heath says, and people and foundations were quick to donate money once they could identify what was being saved

Mr. Heath and his brother, Dan, studied urban legends, business ideas, and other concepts that have fired the public imagination, such as President John F. Kennedy's promise to "put a man on the moon within a decade," to understand what made messages sticky. They have compiled many of their findings in a new book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

In addition to being concrete, each message told a story, the found. The messages, they said, also were:

Emotional. A sticky message should help people care about what the charity is doing.

Mr. Heath described a social-science experiment in which passersby gave twice as much money to a charity when they were asked to help a starving child who was identified by name than when they were asked to alleviate the hunger of 21 million anonymous people. "Find the concrete example that allows people to establish a connection and begin to care about your organization," Mr. Heath told fund raisers.

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