Shumsky Idea Box
What We Need To Know About People
By Harold J. "Si" Seymour"
In organized fund-raising, as indeed in any form of group persuasion, a good way to begin is to learn as much as you can about people. You need to understand, for instance, that genuine leadership in any cause is rare, beyond price, and always the nucleus of significant achievement. And you ought to know, too, that whatever your goals of persuasion may be and whatever your cause, there are three different kinds of people involved.
Knowing these distinctions and taking them into account is important in all sorts of promotion. In fund-raising, this will govern your planning and your timing, strongly affect your costs and largely determine the eventual number of gifts and the amount of the dollars.
So first of all, I propose to discuss leaders and the three kinds of people. Next, I’ll point out the two human aspirations that seem to matter most of all and then suggest which of the basic motivations can best move people to substantial action. After that, I shall review what all people tend to do – in directions important to organized persuasion. And finally, I shall remind you of the one ancient human fear that still gives the whole world the greatest trouble and must, therefore, figure in all we say and do. Know these things, and ponder on them; and you’ll be well on your way.
In any field of human activity, not just in fund-raising, the leaders are indeed rare – never more than 5% of any group or constituency, and usually less. These are the creative citizens, with what Harry Emerson Fosdick has called a “sense of privilege”. They light the way, originate action, take the responsibility, establish the standards, create the confidence, sustain the mood and keep things moving.
And then, about 25 or 30% of the total, is the key group best described as responsible. For they are the ones who can be depended upon to play a thoughtful and proportionate part in any program engaging their advocacy and support. True, they need leadership and guidance, as everyone does, and are susceptible as all of us are to the climate and the planned action. But it is not for them that planners must provide supervision, system and the goad. They will do what they say they will do and will try to do it the way you want it done. They are, obviously, simply wonderful.
Then come the merely responsive, that major group that will probably respond in varying degrees if all the portents and pressures are about right. They rarely act out of sheer impulse, unless negatively. The burdens of inertia and procrastination are ever with them. And while their hearts are warmed when their loyalties and compassions are stirred, they must always constitute the principal target for all the arts of organized persuasion and all the best skills of the fund-raiser.
Finally, at the bottom and merging with the larger group noted above, is the inert fifth. This is the ultimate residuum, which exercises the rights and privileges of citizenship only under direct compulsion and daily shows us in the opinion polls that it can rarely even make up its mind about anything. The finest rhetoric never reaches these people, if only because they are not there to listen. Yet their lamentations never cease, and they are always the first to threaten to cut off the support they have hardly ever given. Well earned here would be the epitaph, “He could always be counted upon to be unreliable”.
For any major type of campaign, some weird rule of three seems to be involved here, which should be heeded even though it is hard indeed to understand. For it has long been customary to say, at the upper levels of fund-raising, that a third of the money has to come from the top ten gifts, the next third from the next one hundred gifts and the last third from everybody else. Similarly, with most of the workers in most campaigns, it is usual to say that a third will perform as asked (the responsible ones); a third group will respond under pressure and prodding; and the last third, no matter what you or anyone else does, will turn out to be mostly dead wood. There will just be time, if all goes well, to reassign their unfinished work to the performing top third. God bless ‘em, who meanwhile will have finished their jobs.
So much for the three kinds of people, and their leaders. And now for other things we should know about them.
Two Universal Aspirations
It is pleasantly easy to say that everyone wants to be loved, admired, respected, remembered favorably, treated fairly and never played down. But it has always seemed to me that we need something more specific than these usual generalities. And I think two top psychiatrists have shown the way.
Dr. Lawrence C. Kolb, my Tenafly neighbor, director of the New York State Institute of Psychiatry and chairman of the department at Columbia, discussed these pages with me and said he thought that what people want most is simply “to be sought”. Millions today are hospitalized or under custodial care, he pointed out, for no better reason than because they think nobody wants them, cares about them or wants to listen to what they have to say. The obverse of this, I think, should be obvious and highly significant.
Cornell’s Dr. Dorothea C. Leighton, after a long study of underprivileged Indian tribes in Canada, concluded that every individual needs to feel that he is “a worthwhile member of a worthwhile group”. And when you read that simple and wonderful phrase over a few times and reflect about it, you will begin to sense how fundamental it is and how universally applicable.
Certainly if your appeal misses these two universal aspirations, you’ll miss many targets and have a much harder time. Play them well and consistently, and you’ll go far.
Basic Motivations
It appears to be a logical corollary – assuming we all aspire to be sought and to be worthwhile members of worthwhile groups – that there can hardly be any stronger motivation for supporting a group or cause than simple pride of association. Certainly any feeling of indifference to an affiliation, worse yet any feeling of shame or hostility and plain lack of confidence, are about the most serious blocks to persuasion one could possibly imagine.
Obviously, pride needs a base of loyalty and favorable attitudes toward the institution, its activities and its personnel. Pride can be and is nurtured by communication and ceremonials. But the one thing that triggers it into action better than anything else is actual participation in program. At a minimum, this involves consistent attendance at meaningful meetings and stated services. At best, it involves acceptance of real responsibility for committee work. And that is what leads more surely to advocacy and support. Those workrooms where the uniformed ladies have worked so well and so long have always been the real beef behind the support of the American Red Cross. Committee work is of the very essence of the Junior League, of boards, service clubs, alumni bodies, chest organizations and any other activity notable for its good name and sound organization. Put pride together with involvement in program, and you have something literally beyond price.
The other basic motivation, I think, becoming more and more significant as any cause climbs the ladder from popular approval all the way up to action by its power structure is responsible concern for continuity. McGeorge Bundy put it this way in his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard in 1965: “to hold to one another across the generations”. Most causes, I think you will find, prosper best in terms of keeping faith with the past, keeping step with the present and keeping some real or implied promise to posterity.
What People Tend To Do
Abraham Lincoln, in that famous quotation about fooling the people, conceded, as we all should, our occasional gullibility. But he had unlimited confidence, as not many leaders do, in the ultimate popular wisdom.
Perhaps the one most important thing for persuaders to remember about people is never to play down to them but always to approach them with due respect for their idealism, courage and intelligence, with full and open confidence in their response to bold leadership and challenging programs. Sir Winston Churchill noted this in one of his observations on the American people: “Their national psychology is such that the bigger the idea, the more wholeheartedly and obstinately do they throw themselves into making it a success.”
And now, here are some things people tend to do which should be of special interest in organization work:
To follow leaders who have their confidence: When the leadership is right and the time is right, the people can always be counted upon to follow – to the end and at all costs. Churchill alone, in the blackest hours of World War II, was proof enough of this. Conversely, Lincoln warned us, “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.” Confidence is the key here for leaders, causes and institutions alike. Lack of confidence, on the other hand, is a sure road to rejection.
To strive for measurable and praiseworthy attainment: All of the admirable abstractions, such as virtue and probity, offer fine food for meditation and win ready endorsement. But let’s not forget that what got many of us out for Sunday school was that series of pins for attendance. Just as football teams need goal lines, causes of all kinds need quota systems and measurable objectives, if you really want the people to get out there and play. There simply has to be a way to win and a reason for cheers.
To seek or achieve unity by group action: Many a cause has improved a faulty public posture merely by putting a lot of volunteers to work and thus multiplying its advocates. It is well to remember, too, these days that most of the parades for causes are not so much for the purpose of impressing those who watch as for unifying those who belong and especially those who march.
To act only under the pressure of deadlines: One fact of life we usually find it convenient to ignore is that whatever we have plenty of time to do is often the thing that never gets done. It seems to be popular to decry pressure. Nobody likes the words, “Do it now”; but on the other hand, one of the greatest soporifics since Rip van Winkle is the line, “at your convenience”. Whether the deadlines are genuine or merely plausible, there has to be a fairly imminent time limit on whatever you wish to persuade people to do.
To relish earned reward and recognition: Napoleon conceded that baubles won no wars, but it was Napoleon himself who founded the Legion of Honor. Those small fish fed to the trained seals every time they do a trick, the buttons and pins awarded for long service, the diplomas, certificates and other evidences of personal involvement in worthwhile groups – all have a message here.
To repeat pleasurable experiences and vice versa: You hear many cries of “worker fatigue” in voluntary activities these days. But the usual trouble with volunteers is not killing them with overwork but simply boring them to death. As with the arts of hospitality, the rule is that if they have a good enough time, they won’t want to leave; and they’ll be pretty sure to come back.
To conceal unpraiseworthy attitudes: Here we have the reason for phony answers to opinion polls and the reason why so many join committees either out of fear or criticism by their peers or in perfunctory submission to social or business pressures – without, in either case, having the slightest intention of performing adequately by word, deed and gift.
To lose our sense of community with more mobility and greater numbers: Now that the average American family moves every five years, and there is coming to be greater variety in our proximity to new or different groups, all of us are probably tending to lose some of our sense of community. The results, all fund-raisers should note, are that many try to do by mail what we used to do by personal visitation and that some of the loyalties and competitive values of local appeals tend to get lost. And that’s too bad; for when you stop to think about it, you will realize that all money has to be raised locally, where people are.
And now, here are some things all of us tend to do which should be of special interest in public relations and publicity work:
To give incomplete attention and indeed to shorten the attention period itself: At best, with few exceptions, people don’t pay close or careful attention to anything. And short of war or national calamity, you can keep the people interested for just so long and then no longer. If the task is still unfinished when the time span is up, you have to reset the stage, shuffle the cast, change the words and music and virtually start all over again. You can say, and rightly, that there is an exception in the field of religion. But even there the seasons and calendars recognize that even forty days is a long, long time.
To glance instead of read: If they pay for it, they’ll read it – maybe, and even probably. But in any works of organized persuasion, including fund-raising, it is doubtful that there has ever been a time when what E. B. White calls “the sweet uses of brevity” have been at such a premium. The shortening limits of attention periods and the tightening extensions in the costly and unremitting fight for the public eye and ear both tell us now that the safest thing is to convey the message almost phrase by phrase and leave it to repetition and the visual aids to pound the message home.
To admire excellence but to suspect perfection: The well-loved Pope John XXIII is said to have squirmed at the very mention of “infallibility”, even within its two highly restricted meanings. And I like to remember, too, what Columbia’s Professor Montague said to the YMCA’s Eugene Barnett many years ago: “If you want to persuade anyone, you can’t afford to be more than 85% right.” Certain it is that the very word “perfect”, either as a verb or as an adjective, should be used sparingly if at all – except, perhaps, in purely theological discourse.
To generalize from acceptable fragments: It may be lamentable and further proof that even our best brains seldom function at more than 10% of capacity; but it is nevertheless useful to know that most people, instead of thinking anything all the way through, prefer the short and easy jump to generalities. It takes very little to confirm a prejudice and not much more to rationalize a favorite opinion. So people tend to believe what their chosen leaders tell them and to be impressed by parables, testimonials, examples, categories and all other short cuts in the arts of persuasion. And because they find it so much easier to assume that all samples truly represent the whole, we should always be careful with our samples.
To respond to the warmth of good sentiment: When Harvard’s retired Professor Howard Mumford Jones addressed his colleagues at a farewell dinner given by the English Department, he said that the three most powerful words in any dialect are “justice, virtue and love”. Commenting further on the soul of a people and what it looks back to with pride and affection, he quoted Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun: “Give me the makings of the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” That is about all that needs to be said here, and it could hardly be said better. We simply need to remember that when you want the heart to prompt the mind to go where logic points the way, nothing can match the warmth of good sentiment.
To prefer incomplete exposure, even a little mystery: It has been plain enough for quite a while that diamonds win more girls than dish pans. And the lofty principle involved here should remind us never to go too far in confronting the people with all the mundane minutiae. By all means, keep the posture of willingness to tell all; but leave a little room for dreams. Other things being equal, the people can always fashion in their own hearts a far better rationale for their support than any of us could ever devise from any long parade of facts and figures.
To like a due amount of dignity in the images of their leaders: Smiles and laughter have their good place with our leaders but never at the loss of basic dignity. Perhaps one of the reasons Calvin Coolidge chose not to run again was that awful picture of him in the headdress of a Sioux Indian chief. Charles de Gaulle, who has parlayed the dead pan into a very big thing indeed, puts it this way: “Prestige cannot exist without mystery, for people revere little what they know too well. All cults have their tabernacles, and no great man is great in the eyes of his servants.” For us, that is pitching it much too strong. But there is something there, just the same, for persuaders to remember. Be free with the fun and laughter, but don’t ever get silly.
To take the message somewhat obliquely: It is an odd but universal trait to enjoy sneaking a look over someone’s shoulder, to be more interested or at least readier to give our attention when someone is telling something to a third party than when they are talking directly to us. Maybe this is why letters to the editor seem to attract more readers than editorials do. Similarly, as national causes have demonstrated many times, it is much easier to persuade any given state to do something because some other state has done it well than because national headquarters says it is a good idea. Alumni of the Harvard Divinity School are said to have read with more than ordinary interest a recent booklet called What the Dean Said to the President.
To go for grooves, categories and easy formulas: We may not remember things as well as we should, but we all know there were ten commandments, that Wilson had fourteen points, that our Russian friends have had lots of five-year plans and so on. Some of the best work ever done by the American Cancer Society has been linked to the effort to teach us “cancer’s seven danger signals”. Whatever the reasons, it is surely clear enough that the categorical approach has at least the merit of historical endorsement.
To reject concepts of debt: Uncle Sam can talk about what you owe him and get his money. But voluntary causes should know by this time that it is a sterile gambit indeed to tell prospective donors that they owe the institution something because service to them was rendered at less than cost. This has proved more than a few times to be very bad stuff indeed in college and university appeals, both with alumni and parents. There is a principle here, akin to losing your friend when you lend him money, that reproach never warms the heart or stirs the spirit.
To suspect and resist change in itself or any other implied threat to security: Change, it has been said by many, is always a threat to somebody’s security. Anything different, more often than not, is considered suspect merely because it is different – especially, it seems, in the realm of ideas. Even in the groves of academe, as David Riesman and others have pointed out, the very persons whose life work it is to question and to differ – namely, the faculty – are usually the first to challenge innovation.
To go with the winning horse: That the people love winners is part of our folklore. And by now it should be one of the accepted legends of fund-raising that support flows to promising programs rather than to needy institutions. You may think, as too many often do, that people will rally around if you tell them things are going badly. But they won’t. You have to whistle the happy tune and keep on the sunny side of the street, where success lies just around the corner.
To pay attention and devote interest in direct proportion to personal identification: In the simplest possible terms, people like to see their names, have them spelled right and have them arranged in the way they like to have them used. Even the agenda for a meeting gets a much more careful look and minutes are more apt to be read, when someone has taken the trouble to type in the corner of every copy, “Copy for Mr. So-and-So”. (And see later remarks about subscription blanks.)
To revere the past, deprecate the present, and fear the future: Here, surely, is the one important tendency that needs neither explanation nor embroidery, except to say that all this goes right along with girth control, hefty bank balances and the chronic improvising of lifelong convictions.
Reviewing all these tendencies of the people, as I hope you will from time to time, I would stress again that they all tend especially to respond well to anything that builds confidence and stirs their pride.
One Universal Fear
Here we have the colossal negative, so vital and so much with us in all our problems today, that it has seemed to me to need a place to itself rather than to be included, as it might have been, in the foregoing summary of what people tend to do.
For there is one fear we are all born with, so deep-seated and so universal and so important that for our purposes here, it dwarfs all others. And this one big fear is so old that the ancient Greeks had a word for it: xenophobia, or fear of the stranger.
Its tribal roots have plagued mankind for countless centuries and tend to block the best of our efforts to attain the brotherhood of man by putting an end to discrimination in race, creed and color. But it is less obvious that this instinct we all have, to beware whatever is different or strange, goes for the world of ideas as well as for the world of people.
Merely the concept of change, inevitable as it may be and pray for it as we may, always needs to be handled deftly, with the least possible reflection on the accepted leadership and the least possible damage to our nostalgic image of the good old days. And this goes for art, music, architecture, color schemes, raiment, typography, the language and everything else with which persuaders may become involved.
SUMMARY
I hope these notes about people will have helped professionals and laity alike to understand better and remember longer:
- Why people should be approached on at least three different levels and probably in three successive stages – beginning with the leadership; moving from the inside out; and not wasting too much time, cost, or effort at the outer periphery of the constituency.
- What two aspirations are important to everybody.
- Which motivations are most likely to move the moveable people to substantial action.
- And, finally, through noting what the people tend to do and tend to fear, why any program seeking popular support should have top leadership; lofty purpose; a challenging goal with intermittent deadlines; a simple message; maximum involvement, respect and allowance for the factor of time; emphases on continuity rather than change; an atmosphere of optimism and universality, proper rewards; and above all, every possible play for confidence and pride.
Professionalism in particular, I would hope, will have been reminded that theirs today is a great and growing task and all the more exacting because so many people are ill informed, moved more by prejudice than by thought and always restlessly uneasy about real or imagined threats to their secret altars. Most people, the pros should remember, don’t really want to read what we write or listen to what is said and, above all, don’t want to have their dreams or their peace disturbed by implications of any kind that the days of their youth and the ways of their fathers were anything less than golden.
But all in all, I would beg you to believe – as I do now and always have – that most of the people are very wonderful indeed, that they almost always wish to do the right thing and that their ultimate performance, when boldly challenged and confidently led, is usually far better than we have any right to expect. Study them, and treat them well, for you need them more than money.
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