Let Them Meet the Person They Helped
Callers who spent five minutes with one scholarship student were raising 171 percent more money a month later. The group who only read his letter didn't move at all.
University fundraising callers spent five minutes with one scholarship student, who told them what the money had changed for him. A second group read his letter and discussed it. A third had no contact at all.
One month later, the five-minute group was spending 142 percent more time on the phone and raising 171 percent more money. The letter group and the control group had not moved.
Reading about the beneficiary did nothing. Meeting him did everything. Impact is hard to hold onto as an abstraction, and a job stripped of its visible consequence decays into activity: calls made, tickets closed, invoices processed. Five minutes in a room restored the consequence, and it held for a month with no follow-up.
Most recognition inside a company travels manager to employee. This runs on a different circuit: the person your work actually reached, saying what it did.
The nudge: Find the team sitting furthest from your customers and put one customer in front of them for five minutes. Live, not a slide with a quote on it. The gap between reading praise and hearing it is the entire effect.
Source: Grant, Campbell, Chen, Cottone, Lapedis & Lee, Impact and the art of motivation maintenance, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2007)
