It’s the last day of the giving year.

By now, the results are in from your year-end direct mail letters. You’ve sent out your New Year’s Eve email appeal (you sent it yesterday or today, right? These are the two highest days for online giving in the year).

How are they performing? Do they meet your expectations?

If not, what will you do differently next time?

Change what you can, know what you can’t

There are probably lots of things you can’t change – your executive director, for instance. Or your budget. With education, perseverance and a bit of moxy, you can change some of the seemingly immovable obstacles to good fundraising. Or not. In that case, please refer to the serenity prayer.)

But you can change how you tell your story.

Always go with emotion

Telling a poignant and emotional story will win out over giving your donors statistics hands down, every time.

Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small researches why people make the decisions they do. The research you care about is the decision whether or not a donor responds to your ask.

Here’s what she says in an interview with the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

“The more vivid the story – through narrative or through imagery – the more emotionally arousing. And emotions are what triggers the impetus to help.”

Lose the statistics

Not only do “emotionally arousing” stories inspire donors to help financially, but they are the ONLY thing that truly does. Mix in some statistics and, poof, you lose your impact.

“Showing statistics can actually blunt this emotional response by causing people to think in a more calculative, albeit uncaring, manner,” Small says. Even if you share both the emotional story and the statistics, donations drop.

People give to people

As much as we want to think our donors are rational, logical, intelligent people who think through every decision, they’re not. At least, that’s not what gets them to give.

According to interviews that CCS conducted with more than 6,200 folks, the top three reasons people give are:

• People are inherently generous
• People give to people
• People respond to a meaningful mission

(You can download the full report, the 2013 Snapshot of Today’s Philanthropic Landscape here.)

So next time, tell a story. Tell one person’s story. Your donors will want to help that one person. Because helping that one person, with that one problem, makes the world a better place. It means they’ve made a difference to one person they’ve identified with or felt something for.

But statistics are cool!

Statistics, however, are for the head. They won’t keep you warm on a cold winter’s night. They certainly won’t warm your donors’ hearts.

Statistics overwhelm. They make the project so big, so huge, that it seems insurmountable. Your donors know they can’t save everyone. They can’t make world hunger go away, or provide free health care to everyone in need, or save every kitten from euthanasia.

But they can feed one person, or provide for one life-saving medical test, or help one, soft, furry, innocent feline ball of fluff.

Making a difference

It’s like the story of the starfish stranded on the beach at high tide, dying in the sun. A man walking along the shore begins throwing them back into the ocean, one by one. He knows he can’t throw every starfish back into the ocean, he can’t save all of them.

A friend walking with him points this out to him. Doesn’t it seem pointless to try and save all of them? How can he make a difference?

The man bends down, picks up another starfish and throws it back into the clear, cool ocean water.

He says, “I made a difference to that one.”

Let your donors make a difference. Give them someone to save.