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Welcome to the Click & Pledge Fundraising Command Center Podcast!
Welcome to the Click & Pledge Fundraising Command Center Podcast – your mission control for mastering modern philanthropy. Every month, we equip you with the insights, tools, and strategies you need to elevate your impact. We believe in understanding the why, mastering the what, and showcasing the how of successful fundraising. Tune in every Monday for a new perspective:
The Why
Start your month with the big picture. "The Why" is our thought-leadership series that dives into the deep, foundational concepts behind our work. Every first Monday, we explore the science, philosophy, and psychology of fundraising, technology, and giving. This show isn't just about what you do; it's about providing a framework for why you do it. Join us as we connect big ideas from neuroscience, behavioral economics, and cognitive science to the future of philanthropy.
The What
Get to know your toolkit. "The What" is our product-focused series where we go "under the hood" of the Click & Pledge platform. Every second Monday, we deconstruct our features, reveal the "story behind the product," and explain what our technology is designed to do. If you want to understand the architecture, the design, and the specific problems our tools solve, this is your guide to the blueprint.
The How
Learn from the leaders. "The How" is our community showcase, where we pass the microphone to the experts: your peers. Every third Monday, we invite nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, and innovators to share how they are using our platform to run successful campaigns, engage donors, and grow their impact. These are their stories, their strategies, and your real-world templates for success.
Welcome to this edition of the Click and Pledge's fundraising command center podcast, where we talk the why, the what, and the how in the Click and Pledge's ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Today, we are really pushing past the traditional metrics. We're going to do a true deep dive into some pretty advanced cognitive science.
Speaker 1:And we're doing this because we believe the future of donor retention and predictability hinges on understanding one single huge idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How the human brain actually works.
Speaker 1:We are talking about a total paradigm shift. I mean, if you're a fundraiser, you've spent your entire career optimizing for what the external rewards, the warm glow, the thank you notes.
Speaker 2:The tax receipt, all of it.
Speaker 1:Right. But what if we told you all of that is secondary? That the real driver for your donor isn't even generosity, but a primal need for certainty.
Speaker 2:And that's the whole thing. We're diving into active inference, which you might also know as the free energy principle. It's a theory developed mainly by the neuroscientist Carl Friston.
Speaker 1:And it really turns our basic assumptions about motivation completely on their head.
Speaker 2:It does. And for anyone who wants to go, you know, really deep into the science behind this
Speaker 1:Which we highly recommend.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. We suggest exploring the foundational book. It's called Active Inference. The free energy principle in mind, brain, and behavior by Par, Pizzulo, Fristim. It lays out all the details.
Speaker 1:But our mission for this deep dive is to translate that complex science into strategy you can actually use.
Speaker 2:We want to show you that donors act not for a thank you note, but to minimize their own internal uncertainty, their own cognitive stress. Stress. Giving is, and this sounds strange, a tool for achieving cognitive safety.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's unpack this. We have to start by, you know, challenging the old view. For decades the model of the brain was that it's a passive camera.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly. The idea was that light comes in, data comes in, the brain processes it, and then it reacts to what it sees.
Speaker 1:And we're suggesting that view is, well, it's just wrong.
Speaker 2:It's incomplete. Especially for something as complex as philanthropy. Active inference says the brain is not a passive camera at all. It is a relentlessly active prediction machine.
Speaker 1:A prediction machine. This is what we call the generative model.
Speaker 2:That's the term. You have this model inside your head and it is constantly running simulations. It's projecting.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:almost hallucinating what it expects the world to be like in the very next second.
Speaker 1:So wait. The outside world, what we're actually seeing and hearing, that's not primary source of reality. That's a huge flip.
Speaker 2:It is a huge flip. The sensory input, what you see and hear, it only really has one job.
Speaker 1:To be the error signal.
Speaker 2:You got it. It's there to correct your internal model, but only when your prediction is wrong. If your brain predicts the world perfectly, you barely even notice it. It's the mismatch that grabs your attention.
Speaker 1:Let's apply that to fundraising right away. So when a donor opens your email, they aren't just passively reading.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. They're actively comparing that email against a prediction they already have about you and about their relationship with you. They're checking for alignment.
Speaker 1:And that failure, that clash between their internal prediction and the external reality.
Speaker 2:That's what the science calls free energy or surprise all. And it's this, painful, uncomfortable experience that we are all biologically wired to avoid.
Speaker 1:Okay. Free energy sounds a little abstract. We need a solid analogy here. The staircase example is perfect for this. I think everyone have felt this.
Speaker 2:Right. So imagine you're walking downstairs in your own house at night. It's dark. You're moving fast because your internal generative model is predicting every single step. The height, the depth.
Speaker 1:You're not even thinking about it.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Then you get to what you think is the last step. You lift your foot, you step down, and there's nothing there. Your foot just drops.
Speaker 1:Oh, that lurch. That horrible sickening feeling in your stomach for just a split second.
Speaker 2:That feeling is free energy. That is That's a surprise. It is your brain's alarm bell screaming that its predictive model of reality just catastrophically failed, and that feeling is deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:And it's not just uncomfortable. It's tied to survival, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's completely tied to survival. Every living thing from an amoeba to you needs to stay within very narrow expected boundaries. Body temperature, safety, hydration. High surprise all means danger. It means uncertainty.
Speaker 1:So the brain, the number one job isn't to be happy. It's not even to learn. It's just to keep the world predictable.
Speaker 2:To aggressively minimize that surprise all and to keep our identity in that world predictable.
Speaker 1:And there it is. That's the pivot for fundraising. You're saying donors give money to minimize that internal uncertainty. The donation isn't a gift, it's a tool.
Speaker 2:It's a tool to resolve that tension when who they think they are clashes with what they see in the world.
Speaker 1:Okay so let's walk through that clash. If my internal identity is, I am a good person who supports childhood literacy.
Speaker 2:That's the prediction your model holds.
Speaker 1:Then I see a news report or I get an email that says, Literacy rates in my city are plummeting.
Speaker 2:Boom. Massive free energy. Your identity model, I am someone who fixes this, is now completely contradicted by reality which is this problem is not fixed. You're surprised and it feels bad.
Speaker 1:So my brain has to fix the error. It has to make reality match my model or change my model to match reality.
Speaker 2:And it only has two ways to do that. The first path is perception. Basically changing your mind to fit the world.
Speaker 1:The snake in the shadow example.
Speaker 2:Right. You see what looks like a snake. You feel that jolt of surprise, you look closer, you update your model, and you realize, oh, it's just a rope. The model changes, the stress is gone.
Speaker 1:That's just a mental fix. But the second path, action. That's where fundraising lives.
Speaker 2:That's exactly it. Path two is action. You change the world to fit your mind. Your internal model predicts you should be warm, but your senses tell you you're cold. You don't change your mind, you perform an action.
Speaker 1:You put on a jacket?
Speaker 2:You put on a jacket, you make the outside world match your internal prediction.
Speaker 1:The donation is the jacket. If I believe I support childhood literacy, then donating a $100 is the action that realigns the world with my identity. I've acted to make my self prediction true again.
Speaker 2:So we're not just selling impact, we're selling agency. We are selling cognitive harmony, a way for the donor to minimize their own free energy.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if we are the tool, then the connection between us and the donor has to be clean, reliable, predictable. This gets us to a concept that sounds really technical, the Markov Blanket.
Speaker 2:It does sound like jargon, strategically, this might be the most important piece of the puzzle. Just think of it as the interface of trust.
Speaker 1:The interface of trust.
Speaker 2:It's the boundary separating the donor, the agent, from the chaos of the environment, which includes your nonprofit.
Speaker 1:For a person, that's our skin and our senses. What is it for an organization?
Speaker 2:For a nonprofit, the Markov Blanket is literally all of your communications. It is every single way a donor experiences you. Your emails, your website, your annual reports, your social media, all of it.
Speaker 1:And this interface has two sides to it, right? Input and output.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You have the sensory states, that's the input. Everything the donor sees and hears from you. Then you have the active states, that's the output. What the donor does.
Speaker 1:Like donate or volunteer.
Speaker 2:Or, and this is crucial,
Speaker 1:is where so many organizations go wrong. They degrade that interface of trust. They send noise.
Speaker 2:So much noise. Confusing signals, irrelevant appeals, generic reports that don't validate the promise you made when they gave the first time.
Speaker 1:And that noise just cranks up the donor's cognitive load. The technical term is entropy. Right? Confusion.
Speaker 2:Yes. If a donor gave $25 specifically to save sea turtles, and then you send them five emails about your new accounting software, That's a massive prediction error. The signal doesn't match their expectation and it causes that deep discomfort.
Speaker 1:And the brain is efficient. It's not gonna write a long complaint letter.
Speaker 2:No way. The easiest, fastest, most aggressive way for the brain to stop that uncomfortable prediction error is to just cut the signal off entirely.
Speaker 1:So churn isn't apathy. It's not about them running out of money.
Speaker 2:We suggest churn is an active decision to eliminate prediction error. The lapsed donor is insulating themselves from you because your inconsistent communication is causing them surprise. They're pulling the plug to stop the confusion.
Speaker 1:This just completely changes how we should look at data. We spend all this time trying to calculate, you know, a propensity score, the likelihood to give.
Speaker 2:But active inference suggests we need to shift our focus to something called precision waiting.
Speaker 1:Okay. What's the difference?
Speaker 2:Likelihood asks, will this person give based on their past behavior? Precision asks, how much confidence does this donor place in our signal? It's all about quality and reliability of the information you provide.
Speaker 1:So a low precision thank you note versus a high precision one, what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Low precision is that generic letter that arrives three months late. It just says, thanks for your gift. Meanwhile, you've sent them 10 confusing emails. Their brain has already flagged you as noise, as spam. The signal has low precision, so it gets ignored.
Speaker 1:But high precision? That means every communication reinforces the original reason they gave.
Speaker 2:Exactly. High precision is an email the next day that says, Remember that 100 you gave for the water pump in Zone 3? Here's a photo of it being installed today, and here's a live link to the water quality data it's now sending back.
Speaker 1:Wow! That signal is trustworthy. It reduces their uncertainty about their impact and it validates their identity. The brain learns that you are a source of clarity, not confusion.
Speaker 2:And that leads to a new strategy we call anticipatory stewardship. You have to be proactive. Don't wait for the donor to wonder where did my money go and build up that free energy.
Speaker 1:You anticipate their need for certainty and give them the proof before they even have to ask.
Speaker 2:You're managing their expected free energy for them.
Speaker 1:This also makes us think about the two kinds of value we offer donors. There's pragmatic value and then epistemic value.
Speaker 2:Right. Pragmatic value is the easy stuff, the tax break, the simple thank you, maybe a tote bag. It's transactional certainty.
Speaker 1:But your major donors, foundation partners, they're often running on a different kind of fuel.
Speaker 2:They absolutely are. They are driven by epistemic value. That's the value of gaining information, of understanding a complex problem, of resolving ambiguity. They get their certainty from gaining knowledge. They have an epistemic hunger.
Speaker 1:They want the puzzle pieces.
Speaker 2:They want the why and the how.
Speaker 1:So we need to rethink the ask. Let's contrast a bad traditional ask with an active inference one.
Speaker 2:The traditional ask is purely pragmatic. Give 50 to fix the coral reef. The act of inference ask feeds that epistemic hunger. Sounds more like:
Speaker 1:We're seeing unexpected bleaching patterns in this sector. Our models can't explain why. We need to deploy sensors to gather the missing data to resolve this uncertainty. Will you help us find the missing variable?
Speaker 2:Exactly. You're inviting them to be a partner in resolving ambiguity. You're funding the clarification not just the action. It engages their brain at the highest level.
Speaker 1:And this framework is so important for trying to win back a lapsed donor. You suggest a lapsed donor is in what's called the dark room.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the dark room problem. It's a thought experiment. If the brain's ultimate goal is to minimize surprise, the perfect solution is a totally dark, totally quiet room. Zero input means zero chance of being surprised.
Speaker 1:And the lapsed donor has chosen that dark room. They've shut you out to feel safe from the confusion your signals were causing.
Speaker 2:Which is why sending them a guilt trip like, We miss you! Is the worst possible thing you can Yeah. It just confirms their decision that you're a source of noise.
Speaker 1:So to get them back, you have to offer a huge high precision signal.
Speaker 2:A signal that promises a massive reduction in their uncertainty. You have to restore their agency. The message becomes, we know we were confusing, but here's a piece of the puzzle we just found partly because of what you helped us do before. You are a source of clarity and we need your insight on this.
Speaker 1:You promise clarity, not just ask for money. This is it's a huge shift. Yeah. And it opens up some incredible future possibilities, like the donor digital twin.
Speaker 2:This is where it gets really forward looking. If every donor has a unique generative model, their own beliefs and expectations, imagine using AI to simulate that specific donor's model.
Speaker 1:A digital twin. So you could test your emails on the AI first.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And the AI wouldn't just tell you if they're likely to click. It would predict if your email is going to create clarity, which is good, or confusion and surprise, which is bad, before you ever send it to a real person.
Speaker 1:It moves data from being about the past to predicting the future cognitive state of your donor.
Speaker 2:It's the ultimate form of anticipatory stewardship.
Speaker 1:It's a truly fascinating framework. Let's just quickly summarize the big strategic shifts this requires.
Speaker 2:First, the donor's goal isn't the warm glow. It's minimizing uncertainty and validating their identity. Giving is self regulation.
Speaker 1:Second, churn isn't apathy. It's an active decision to escape the surprise caused by your inconsistent signals.
Speaker 2:And finally, your data strategy has to shift from describing who gave to predicting what defines their internal model. You have to start selling clarity.
Speaker 1:It seems so clear that this drive to make the world predictable is probably the most powerful and untapped motivator we have.
Speaker 2:And here's the final thought to leave you with. While that perfect dark room of zero surprise is the theoretical goal, it's also incredibly boring.
Speaker 1:We need some surprises.
Speaker 2:We need manageable surprises. Learning a new skill, looking at art, solving a puzzle. These things keep our predictive model sharp without completely breaking them.
Speaker 1:So true mastery in fundraising is about balancing that pragmatic value, the safety and validation, with the epistemic value, which is feeding that curiosity and making the donor a partner and solving the puzzle.
Speaker 2:That is how you build real, lasting trust. It a whole new way to think about your communications.
Speaker 1:For more information about this and all Click and Pledge products, make sure to visit clickandpledge.com and request for a one on one training or demo. Whether you are a client or curious about our platform, just ask us and we will gladly get together with you to chat.
Speaker 2:And don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to stay up to date with all the latest and greatest features of the Click and Pledge Fundraising Command Center.