Plymouth Charity Lab to put ‘proud fundraiser’ to test at Convention
Howard Lake | 5 July 2015 | News
Delegates at this week’s National Fundraising Convention will get the chance to be tested on just how proud of being a fundraiser they really are. #ProudFundraiser was the theme of the 2014 Convention.
Plymouth University’s Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy (CSP) will be running a psychology laboratory throughout the three-day event put on by the Institute of Fundraising. For this week only the Plymouth Charity Lab, which is based on the university campus, will decamp to the Hilton London Metropole, the venue for the Convention.
Jen Shang, CSP’s director of research, said:
“It is a well known phenomenon in psychology that what people say about how they feel is not necessarily how they really do feel.
“For example, people may feel far from proud when they have to shy away from pushing through a really tough decision during a board meeting, resolving a really difficult conflict with their supervisor or fighting a really hard political battle with their rivals.
“Those things are really hard to do and even when we are doing our very best, sometimes, we still cannot make ourselves proud in what we do.”
You’ve got the #proudfundraiser badge, but can you prove you are?
Sophie Kong, manager of the Plymouth Charity Lab, explained:
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“Delegates will need to set aside about 25 minutes to respond to a series of ‘implicit cognition’ tasks at a computer workstation, which involve measuring a participant’s reaction time to particular stimuli. How professionally proud they claim to be will affect their reaction times, although we’re not saying whether it will slow them down or speed them up.”
Where to find the Plymouth Charity Lab at Convention
The Plymouth Charity Lab’s temporary base at Convention will be on the podium overlooking the main exhibition hall in the Monarch Suite. There will be 10 PCs there.
What will you learn?
Participants in the research will receive a report letting them know how proud they are as an individual. After the Convention they will also receive a report with the aggregated data that will show how proud participating fundraisers as a whole were of their profession.
If 25 minutes sounds too much at Convention, there is the incentive of entering a draw to win an iPad Mini for themselves and a free 20-question email survey for their charity.
[message_box title=”About the Plymouth Charity Lab” color=”blue”]
The Plymouth Charity Lab assists researchers to carry out excellent research to advance our scientific understanding of sustainable philanthropy.
The research topics being conducted span a wide range of disciplines, including:
• philanthropic psychology
• marketing
• system-dynamics
• simulation-based entrepreneurship education.
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Image: brain think bubble by Flat Design on Shutterstock.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.