The importance of ‘fun’ in ‘fundraising’
By Anna Clark
At the end of last year, Volkswagen launched an initiative called The Fun Theory, based around the idea that you can use fun to change people’s behaviour for the better. They made some changes to public places to make ‘better’ behaviour more fun – changes such as replacing a normal staircase with a giant piano staircase, where lo and behold, people began to use the stairs instead of taking the escalator. Having set the ball rolling, Volkswagen called for people to submit their examples of using fun to change behaviour, and shared the results on their website: http://www.thefuntheory.com/
This seemed an interesting idea to me – and is an interesting take on the carrot and stick approach. We often talk about the ‘gap’ between what consumers know they should do, and how they actually behave, which spans thing such as health activities, and green behaviours, and other ‘socially responsible’ acts. It seems that in spite of having the knowledge of what they should of, consumers feel they face legitimate barriers such as a lack of money, or time, when perhaps really it’s motivation that’s lacking.
A key criticism of The Fun theory is that the changes they’ve made are clearly a novelty, and while they show a 66% uplift in people taking the stairs that day, would this continue over a longer timeframe, or would people slip back into old habits?
Back in July 1985 Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organised a multi-venue rock concert to raise awareness, and funds for famine relief in Ethiopia: LiveAid. Broadcasts of this event were watched by an estimated 400 million viewers, across 60 countries, uniting consumers across the globe for a few hours behind a single cause. This event arguably spawned a whole new type of fundraising, to the extent that the ‘benefit concert’ is now almost a reflex action when a disaster occurs. Not that I am suggesting this is a bad thing of course, anything that raises money for charity that might not otherwise have been donated has got to be a good thing.
My question is whether the money that these events raise is extra money, or could it be raised without the massive expense and hype of putting on such a major event? Arguably, the event is for many the trigger to a donation – they go, they have a great time, they are moved by what they see, and they donate. The concert is a motivation tool to get people to ‘do the right thing’, and maybe, it spurs people to give who wouldn’t otherwise.
In our Roper Reports Worldwide survey we ask consumers how often they volunteer or help others, and around one in three say they do so monthly or more often. This is remarkably stable across all age groups – suggesting people are volunteers, or they’re not, and this doesn’t change drastically throughout the life course. I’d imagined that volunteering would relate to how much time consumers have available – the more time on their hands the more volunteering they would do.
However, we also asked consumers if they had more time, or more money how they would spend it. Interestingly, around one-third of volunteers would do more for others, while 18% of non-volunteers would do so. To me this suggests that the means we have available in terms of time and money, are only a part of what influences what we are willing to give to benefit others.
Perhaps recognising people’s fickle nature, Orange neatly turned the ‘benefit concert’ on its head, when it developed the Orange RockCorp movement – running for a couple of years now this required young people to do some voluntary work, and one they’ve completed a certain amount, they are rewarded with gig tickets. This truly makes use of a ‘good behaviour and reward’ mechanism, and as it gets people into volunteering from a young age, I wonder if such an initiative might change behaviour in the longer term.
Of course, anything that encourages consumers to be better citizens has got to be a good thing, and if brands can do so, and forge a relationship with consumers at the same time, so much the better.
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