Fundraising is a Physics Problem Not Marketing

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.

And today, we're doing a deep dive into the why. So we're gonna set aside, you know, the usual metrics like conversion rates for a moment.

Yeah. No AB testing today.

None of that. We're gonna tackle something much more fundamental. We're talking about the philosophical and really the scientific blueprints behind truly frictionless technology.

It's a huge question. We're asking, how do we design these systems in a way that actually respects human biology?

Exactly.

And our mission today is, well, it's pretty ambitious, we're suggesting that you stop thinking about fundraising as just a communication problem.

Or a marketing problem.

Or a marketing problem, and instead start treating it like a physics problem. It's this radical idea of how to capture a donor's potential energy.

That white hot moment of impulse.

Right. Before all that energy just, you know, dissipates. And to do that, we have to understand how the human brain actually processes friction.

It might sound a little academic at first. I get that. Mhmm. But once you connect these, like, high level scientific ideas to the actual milliseconds of a checkout process, it just changes everything.

It changes your entire digital strategy.

Yeah. It's all about building tech that works with the brain, not against it.

Okay, so let's unpack that. I want to start with a concept from what, the nineteen fifties. But it is so relevant to It's what we're doing C. H. Waddington's epigenetic landscape.

Oh, it's a brilliant metaphor.

When I first saw this, I was just stunned by how clearly it visualizes the user journey.

It really is. Waddington, this was back in 1957. He was trying to illustrate how complex systems arrive at certain outcomes. So he visualized it as a ball rolling down a hill.

But not just any hill, it's a really complex contoured landscape. So if you picture this, the ball is our donor, and as it starts rolling, it's not a flat field.

No. Not at all.

It's full of ridges and slopes, and most importantly, really defined valleys.

Right. And when the ball enters one of those valleys, its path is pretty much set. That's what he called canalization.

Its destiny is sort of determined at that point.

And what's so key here is that once that ball is in a valley, once it's canalized, it takes a huge, just a disproportionate amount of energy to push it out.

Or to steer it over a ridge into a different valley.

Exactly.

And that, right there, that is the flaw in how we've traditionally built fundraising models.

The destination based models.

Yes. We build one big, deep, complicated valley, our standard donation form, and we just assume the ball, the donor, has to find that one specific path.

We spend all our energy trying to shout at the ball, trying to steer it, hoping it will somehow climb over this ridge we build into the landscape.

It's like we're fighting against the hill itself.

That fight against the natural flow is just exhausting for the user and it's why so many potential donations just get abandoned. We're asking them to do all the work.

Which brings us to the second piece of this puzzle. This one's from, modern neuroscience, Carl Friston's free energy principle.

Yes. So if Waddington gives us the landscape, Friston tells us what's going on inside the ball.

What's driving it?

It's one of the most powerful ideas of biology really. Fristen suggests that all living things, every biological system is constantly trying to minimize something called free energy.

And for our purposes today, the way to think about free energy is just surprise

or prediction error. It's the gap between what my brain thinks is going to happen next and what actually happens.

Okay. Give me an example.

Think about logging into a new website. Your brain predicts a simple two field form, you know, email password,

right? Simple.

But instead you get a redirect to another page, then a CAPITCHA puzzle, then a pop up and then maybe a five step security check.

Oh, I hate that.

That unexpected complexity, the surprise it spikes your cognitive load instantly, that feeling of stress, that's your free energy going through

the roof. Because your brain is, I mean it's fundamentally lazy right? In the best way.

In the most efficient way possible. It hates processing unexpected information. So the moment a user hits an obstacle like a weird redirect or a form that feels too long, the brain registers that prediction error.

And what's the easiest way for the brain to minimize that surprise?

Just abandon the task. It's the path of least resistance. The brain decides the cognitive cost of finishing this donation is suddenly way higher than the emotional reward it was expecting.

So let's bring this down to the ground. Let's talk about the typical donor journey, the old way we do things. We start with this incredible potential energy.

Yeah, the donor is inspired, they're watching a video or reading a story. That urge to give is the energy source.

And then what do we do? We immediately throw rocks in their path.

We turn that smooth ride into a bumpy one.

We force them to break their focus. They have to click a link, which takes them away from the content they were enjoying. That's a redirect.

And a redirect is the most fundamental rock in Waddington's landscape.

Right. The browser changes, the layout's different, maybe the branding even shifts. Then we ask them to fill out a form with a dozen fields.

Every single one of those fields, every redirect, is asking that donor to mentally climb a ridge. We're asking the ball to change its natural downward path.

And physics tells us that changing direction requires energy.

And that energy has to come from somewhere. It comes directly from the donor's initial emotional momentum.

Okay, but I have to play devil's advocate for a second. This is the pushback we sometimes hear.

Go for it.

If giving is supposed to be this meaningful act, shouldn't there be some effort? Are we, I don't know, chipping it by making it too easy?

That's a great question and a crucial distinction. We are fighting process friction, not emotional investment. Okay. Emotional investment is already there, that's the impulse. We just want to make sure that the mechanics of the process don't kill that impulse before it can become an action.

So the emotion should fuel the act, not be wasted fighting the technology.

You got it.

That makes perfect sense. I was trying to donate after watching this powerful film the other day. I clicked the button, it opened a new tab, and the page timed out. Ugh. I refreshed it, it made me log in again, and then the form kept rejecting my postal code on my phone.

Your brain was experiencing a massive spike in free energy. It was screaming, Get me out of here!

I actually gave

's the reality. If the friction of the process is greater than the emotional momentum you started with, the ball just stops rolling. The donation is lost. It happens thousands of times a minute.

So if friction is just inherent in how the web works and redirects our fighting against both gravity and our own biology. Yeah. How do you solve this? I mean, do you fix gravity?

That's the million dollar question. Yeah. And we recommend a radical solution. You don't fight gravity and you don't try to steer the ball to your valley.

So what do you do?

You invert the entire model. We suggest that instead of forcing the ball to a pre existing valley, we move the valley to the ball.

Wow. Okay. That's a, that's a profound strategic shift. It is. You're saying we move away from the old destination model, the idea that you have to come to our website to give.

And we move to what we call the ambient model.

The ambient model.

The idea is that the ability to give should just surround the donor. It should be everywhere, always present, and require, you know, near zero effort to use.

So we're essentially terraforming the ground underneath the donor at the exact moment they feel that impulse.

Exactly. Capturing their potential energy before it has any chance to fade.

So let's talk about the engineering of this. How do we actually create this anti friction environment? I know we talk about achieving something called laminar flow.

Right. Laminar flow is a concept from fluid dynamics. Just picture water moving smoothly through a pipe, it's calm, it's efficient, all the particles are moving in the same direction.

And the opposite is turbulent flow.

Turbulent flow which is chaotic, the water is swirling, it's losing energy all over the place, A redirect is turbulence.

So for the donor journey we want that smooth straight line from impulse to confirmation. No cognitive turbulence.

Exactly. And our technical solution really focuses on three things to get that laminar flow. The first is what we call the superposition of giving.

Superposition. That sounds like you're applying quantum mechanics to fundraising.

Functionally, it kind of is. Platforms like Payquickly do this. The ability to donate exists in a state of well superposition. It's everywhere at once waiting to be needed.

So the user never has to leave where they are to go to some static URL?

Never. When the donor feels that desire the form doesn't need to be navigated to, it materializes in situ.

Spikes.

It does. By getting rid of that redirect, we preserve momentum. Think about someone watching content on say pledge TV, they're immersed in the story.

They're in the flow.

That's laminar flow, Their emotional energy is focused.

But if we say, Hey, stop watching, click here, wait for new page to load, we've just created turbulence.

You've broken the narrative, shifted their context, and spiked their free energy, you've surprised them.

But by overlaying the donation opportunity directly on top of the video.

We maintain the flow. They can act on their impulse without ever interrupting the experience. All that potential energy converts directly into the donation instead of being wasted fighting the interface.

Which all feeds into the ultimate goal here, which is minimizing cognitive delta.

Right. You want to perfectly align the external reality, the giving mechanism, with the donor's internal prediction.

So if their internal thought is, I want to help now.

And the mechanism appears instantly with a single thumbprint or pre filled field, then the free energy that surprise is basically zero. We've engineered the path of absolute least resistance.

So there's no cognitive burden, there's only resolution.

We recommend that the technology shouldn't even feel like a process. It should feel like an organic extension of their own impulse. That's how you respect Waddington's landscape and minimize Friston's free energy.

You know, this whole deep dive really shows something fundamental about great technology design.

What's that?

That the best technology should be in a way philosophically invisible. It should reduce friction so completely that the donor doesn't even notice the tool.

They only perceive the outcome, the feeling of having successfully given.

That invisibility, that's the real mark of genius in this space. It means you've finally done it. You've moved the valley to the ball.

And so, we'll leave you with a final thought to apply to your own work, take a really critical look at your current fundraising journey, and pinpoint every single spot where you are accidentally creating surprise for your donors.

Where are the redirects, the extra clicks, the long forms that are forcing that ball to expend too much energy?

And then ask yourself, how could inverting that model, allowing the ability to give to appear ambiently, totally change your outcome?

For more information about how you can start applying this philosophy in 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'll gladly get together with you to chat.

And don't forget to subscribe to this deep dive to stay up to date with all the latest and greatest features of the Click and Pledge fundraising command center.