The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (19 page)

I
magine that you have an upcoming business trip. Recognizing that you’ll have a couple of hours on the flight to catch up on some reading, you decide to pop down to your local bookstore to look for an interesting read. As you browse through the business bestseller lists you notice an interesting-looking book that claims to provide readers with over 50 ways to become a more effective and influential communicator. Given that the purpose of your trip is to meet a new client who you know will need a lot of convincing, you think that access to more than 50 persuasion strategies seems like something that will be really helpful to you. You decide to purchase the book.

Approaching the counter to pay, you notice that the price tag on the book is missing and, explaining that the store’s computers are down, the store owner suggests that you simply pay what you think the book is worth. Would you be willing to pay more for this book of 52 insights if you first thought about how much you would be willing to pay for just 1 insight?

Behavioral scientists believe that the answer to this question is a clear yes. Interestingly, this seemingly trivial act of asking someone to first think about a smaller, individualized element of a request can make a big difference when it comes to getting them to say yes to subsequent and much larger elements of the request, too. This
SMALL
BIG strategy, known as
unit-asking
, has potentially many uses beyond simply determining how much you are willing to pay for a book (regardless of how great it is).

By way of an example let’s focus for a few moments on how a charity might use this
SMALL
BIG strategy to increase donations to its cause. A common challenge that fundraisers have is that potential donors will often be insensitive to the number of people in need of help. As a result they will often donate similar amounts of money regardless of whether the true number in need is one person, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Researchers Christopher Hsee, Jiao Zhang, Zoe Lu, and Fei Xu thought that donors would contribute more to a campaign if they were asked first to indicate a hypothetical amount they would be willing to donate to help one victim.

In one of their studies, Hsee and his colleagues arranged for 800 employees working in a mid-sized Chinese company to receive an email from their employer encouraging them to take part in a fundraising program designed to help 40 students from low-i
ncome
families. Those who were willing to help were asked to make their donation within one week of receiving the email message via a specific website that had been set up to receive their gifts. Three hundred and twenty employees responded and visited the website. However, unbeknownst to them, half of them were directed to a standard website while the other half were directed to a “unit-a
sking
” version of the website.

The employees who visited the standard website read the following:

After entering their chosen donation amount on-screen, the employees were then given the option to revise their donation amount or to submit it.

The unit-asking version of the website was identical to the standard one but with an important difference. Before the employees were asked how much they would be willing to donate for all 40 students, they were first asked to think hypothetically about their willingness to help just one student.

Specifically the unit-asking website stated

After respondents typed the amount they would hypothetically donate to one student, they were then asked how much they would be willing to donate for all 40.

This simple act of unit-asking had a significant impact on donations. Donors in the standard website group gave an average of 315 yuan (around $50), but those in the unit-asking group donated an average of 600 yuan (over $95). Posing a unit-asking question first was the
SMALL
BIG that increased donations by 90 percent.

So far so good. But isn’t there a potential downside to the strategy? For example, could the posing of the unit-asking question reduce the overall percentage of visitors who leave a donation because some people would object to being asked this odd question? The researchers considered this possibility and were able to report that the extra question had no significant impact on the overall number of visitors who went on to donate.

For fundraisers the advice seems pretty clear. When constructing an appeal, it can be tempting to communicate to potential donors the scale of the problem you are trying to deal with by highlighting the large number of people in need. However, doing that may actually reduce rather than increase the average contribution to your cause. Instead it is beneficial for you to direct potential donors’ attention to what amount they might be willing to give to just one individual in need before requesting a pledge for the larger number.

Beyond fundraising and charitable appeals there are other areas where the
SMALL
BIG of unit-asking could lead to desirable outcomes. Managers trying to increase their annual budget for travel might be more successful at pitching for the funds needed to accomplish their goals by first asking their department heads to consider how much they would fund for a single trip. Similarly, educators who lobby parents and supporters for much-needed school books might inquire about their willingness to support the reading needs of one child before broadening the appeal to the whole classroom. An eBayer might garner higher bids when selling goods online that come in sets (e.g., glassware, box-set DVDs, and luggage) if they pose the question “How much would you be willing to pay for just one?” alongside their product descriptions.

It is important to recognize, however, that despite there being many potential contexts for deploying this unit-asking strategy, there is one specific situation in which this approach is likely to be limited—when the broader target numbers are especially large. For example, Hsee and his colleagues suggest in situations where a charitable campaign is seeking to help tens of thousands of needy folks that the act of unit-asking is unlikely to have an effect due to people’s tendency to encode large numbers such as tens of thousands as simply “a lot.”

Does this mean that all is lost in circumstances where fundraisers are looking to persuade donors to contribute to campaigns in which many thousands of people require help? Certainly not. But it does require fundraisers to adopt a different strategy: a strategy, like all the others in this book, that requires just a small shift in emphasis, and one that we take a closer look at in the next chapter.

O
n 13 March 2002 an Indonesian tanker caught fire some 600 miles off the coast of Honolulu killing one crew member and wiping out all power and communications aboard the ship. It would be another three weeks before a passing cruise ship spotted a distress signal and, pulling alongside, rescued the captain and ten surviving crew members.

It remains unclear why the captain’s dog, a two-year-old terrier crossbreed called Forgea, was left behind during the rescue, but a remark made by one of the cruise ship passengers during a news channel interview that she thought she saw a dog left behind sparked a rescue mission. The operation, which was coordinated by the American Marine Corps, lasted 16 days and cost $48,000, mostly financed by a fundraising campaign launched by a local charity called the Hawaiian Humane Society. Given that the per head cost of rescuing the crew averaged less than half the sum for saving the dog, it might be worth asking which features of the fundraising campaign were responsible for persuading Hawaiians to raise such a remarkable sum of money to save one animal. More broadly, it is also worth asking whether these same lessons apply not only to fundraising and charitable appeals, but to other influence and persuasion challenges.

Previous research has shown that one way fundraising organizations can influence both the number of donors that contribute to a campaign and the generosity of those donors is to draw audience attention to a specific feature of an identified victim that
individualizes
him or her—such as the person’s age, gender, or even hair color. Making these small but crucial details available early on in a communication serves to focus attention on the individual life at stake. This, in turn, increases the value people place on that life compared to when that same victim is presented as abstract, anonymous, or part of a larger group. For example, one study looking at the medical decisions made by physicians found that when a photograph of a patient was included on their CT scan, doctors recommended more caring and attentive treatment because it enabled them to focus on the patient as an identifiable individual rather than as part of a group of patients.

The idea that people feel more generous when their attention is drawn to a victim that is presented as both an individual and identifiable might go some way in explaining the extraordinary flood of donations to save Forgea. As the only canine on board a ship full of sailors, she was certainly identifiable. Reports describing her as a white terrier mixed breed that enjoyed eating pizza and who weighed in at 40 pounds served to present her as an individual too—albeit a rather hefty one.

Accordingly, a simple change that anyone can make when seeking the support of others could be to highlight, early on, small, specific, and important features that both identify and individualize the beneficiaries of their campaign. Beyond the clear implications for charities, perhaps managers at budget negotiation time could, rather than simply pointing to meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet, instead show images that identify and individualize the people in their teams. “This is Mary, our head analyst, who together with Jim and Lindsay and their teams need a system upgrade this year, which accounts for X percent of the increase in the budget I am submitting.”

Such appeals could be advanced even more by making an additional small change aligned with another insight from persuasion science. Social scientists Cynthia Cryder, George Loewenstein, and Richard Scheines hypothesized that in addition to highlighting an “identified individual,” a campaign could be further boosted by stressing an “identified intervention.”

In one of their experiments participants were randomly assigned to three groups and presented with an online scenario about donating to Oxfam. In a “general charity condition,” participants read:

In a second condition, “charity details—high impact,” they read the same message but with one addition:

Finally, participants in a “charity details—low impact” condition read the same sentence except the word “clean” was changed to “bottled” because pre-tests had shown that “clean” water was perceived to create more impact than “bottled” water.

While the wording changes made across the appeals could be considered tiny, the impact on donations was anything but tiny. Compared to participants in the “general charity condition,” who indicated they would donate an average of $7.50, participants in the “charity details—high impact” group (who were furnished with information about how the money would be used) gave 37 percent more. That’s an impressive uplift for such a small change. Thus, you would be well advised to supplement your appeals for extra resources—regardless of whether for information, time, money, or even people—by adding an identifiable intervention to your proposal.

Similarly the manager seeking extra budget for a systems upgrade would be advised to point out to budget holders the specific impact that providing extra resources to Mary and her team would have. But what kinds of specific impact should one point toward?

For a potential answer let’s take a closer look at the Cryder, Loewenstein, and Scheines study, specifically at the participants in the charity details–low impact condition who were told they were contributing toward bottled, rather than clean, water. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that they donated less than those told they were contributing toward clean water. But you may well be surprised to learn that they also gave less than those in the general charity condition who weren’t given any additional information at all.

The reason is that when attempting to boost appeals for more resources, details about interventions only matter to the extent that they promote a perceived impact. In the Oxfam example it is easy to see why potential donors would believe that providing bottled water would have much less of a perceived impact than providing clean water—so much so that it actually led to donations at an even lower level than when the information wasn’t given in the first place.

This insight calls into focus a related yet still all-too-common trap that communicators fall into. When highlighting the impact of the extra resources that they are requesting, they often make the mistake of promoting the effect the resources will have on themselves rather than the perceived impact they will have on those who actually provide the resources. For example, it is easy to see how the manager pitching for extra resources to finance a system upgrade might focus on the actual impact it will have on
her team’s
ability to deliver improved services—rather than the perceived impact those improved services will have on the rest of the organization.

Therefore, whenever you find yourself in a situation where you need to persuade others to give up resources to help you achieve a goal, these
SMALL
BIGs demonstrate that you should focus your audience’s attention on the identifying features of both the entity and the intervention involved.