Fundraisers mustn’t be ashamed of using the most cutting-edge marketing techniques. If they are, Meredith Niles warns, then the future is bleak.

Recently, I attended a thought-provoking seminar about behavioural economics for the web. We talked about social proof (how knowing that others, particularly others who I believe are like me or who I aspire to be more like, have taken an action makes me more likely to take the same action) and about choice paralysis (how offering too many choices limits the number of consumers who take any decision). We even touched on one of my favourite techniques, the decoy effect, whereby deliberately introducing a third, unattractive option helps clarify the decision between two similar options.

Because it is not always immediately obvious how the techniques we discussed could be adapted from a traditional commercial application to the context of encouraging a potential supporter to make a gift, I did find myself wishing that there were more charity representatives in the room. However, it was when the subject of ethics came up that I really wished I wasn’t so outnumbered.

It all started when someone sheepishly raised his hand and asked something to the effect of, “I get that these techniques work, but is it really ok for us to be taking advantage of them?”

In reply, another attendee offered, “Yeah, I mean, I was doing a lot of this intuitively, but I feel like knowing the science behind it makes it a little suspect.”

Oh dear, I thought to myself, surely the goal is to be more than accidentally good at marketing?

It was the next comment that really got to me, though. A gentleman who had helped design a mobile shopping platform for one of the country’s largest food retailers remarked, “I suppose that we’re comfortable with the idea of for-profit companies using these strategies, but it really doesn’t sit well to think about charities manipulating us like this.” Much nodding ensued.

At this point, I felt I had to jump in and defend my fellow fundraisers. The crux of my argument was that not-for-profit organisations trying to effect positive social change are already at a massive disadvantage compared to for-profit companies. We are smaller, and we rely largely on donations from a public that is often sceptical of us spending money on anything other than direct service provision, even if that investment could generate significant returns in the form of increased donations. There are times when our objectives put us in direct competition with for-profit companies who have war chests to spend on promoting products with precisely opposite aims (look at charities that promote a healthy diet having to take on junk food manufacturers). So essentially, we’re already unevenly matched, and now we have to fight with one arm tied behind our back because there is a suggestion it would be unseemly to take advantage of documented psychological insight?

In fairness to the rest of the room, my rather impassioned defence of fundraisers’ right to effective marketing generated as many, if not more, nods than the original comment that prompted me to step onto my soapbox. It was clearly a relatively lightly held view, probably a knee-jerk reaction at best. My concern is that, left unchallenged, such prejudices can harden into attitudes that make it more difficult for fundraisers to do their jobs effectively.

It is entirely appropriate that fundraisers are held to exceptionally high ethical standards. The Institute of Fundraising has unambiguous guidance around the need for transparency and for fundraisers to take care not to deliberately exploit mistakes made by donors. But that does not mean that we shouldn’t try to frame our appeals in ways that makes them most likely to generate a response. To the contrary, I think the fact that we are so relatively resource constrained makes it even more important for charity marketers to be able to tap into these free, and freely available, techniques in order to make our limited pounds go further. We should be harnessing every available tool at our disposal, and when we do, we should be proud of the fact that we’re marketing smartly.

Meredith Niles is head of innovation in fundraising at Marie Curie Cancer Care