With this broad definition of entertainment, you can see it.

It covers a lot of things, But could philanthropy be a form of entertainment?

I'd like you to think back to the last time you did something nice for someone.

Maybe you, uh, shared some food with a co worker at work or took a friend out for a drink after they had a bad day.

Maybe you gave to a charity or even gave to your cousin's crowdfunding campaign.

How did it feel?

Kind of warm and fuzzy.

If you did something that really made the difference, Maybe you felt pretty excited.

Researchers shown that when we do good things for other people, our brains flood our bodies with a special set of hormones.

They're called oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine, and together they make up what's known as the happiness trifecta.

Now this trifecta does some great things that boosts our mood.

It gives us a feeling of connection with our community of bonding.

It pumps up our immune system route reduces our experience of stress and pain.

It helps improve our our digestion, our memory, our sleeping and our ability to learn.

And it motivates us to do this all again.

So anyway, when we fled with a sense of Dorfman's with a set of endorphins, we experience pleasure.

So what we can say is that giving feels good, does good and is good for us.

But what motivates giving some of our generosity is inspired by feelings of community responsibility, social responsibility.

Sometimes we give because we need to make ourselves feel better.

We've seen things that happened in the world that caused this emotional discomfort.

We might see a child who's been injured or a family that's hungry, living in poverty.

These things make us feel unsettled, scared, maybe even outraged.

The good news is that if we see something that we can do to help, even a little bit, this discomfort motivates us to try and and help.

So we might volunteer our time and put some effort into trying to make a difference.

Or we might give some money to other people in order to try and get them to help fix the problem.

But no matter what we do, it crosses something.

Costas, Um, effort, sometimes some energy, some money.

And in order for us evolutionary wise to be rewarded for this, our bodies will create a profound physiological response.

And it will flood our bodies with a little bit of this addictive happiness trifecta and will feel a little bit better.

And because of the of the other dopamine that's involved were also feeling like we want to do it again.

Let's talk about philanthropy.

Philanthropy is anything we do to help others being an individual, a group or society at large.

We channel Ah, whole bunch of our philanthropy through charities, and one of the big worries that we have right now is the charity's air.

Facing a funding squeeze, individual donors are one of the largest sources of funding for charities.

But in the first half of this year, despite the really good economy, the number of donors has been reduced by 6%.

If this continues over the course of next few years, it's gonna cause a major source of financial pain for our charities.

That's something I'm really worried about.

Charities provide some working some of the hardest problems in our society that businesses and governments can't or don't want to address.

We need to figure out how to reverse this loss of donors, and one of the ways to do that is to look at the underlying cause is one of the biggest influencers of that the demographic shift that's occurring in their society.

People that were born after the Internet was invented have grown up in a world where online access is a fundamental part of their lives.

Some people who are born before the Internet but have nevertheless have enthusiastically embraced it.

Both of these groups of people like to participate and live their lives online.

Because of that, I call them digital citizens.

Some people are not as excited about the Internet and only occasionally adventure into the digital landscape.

I call these people digital tourists.

They find the culture of the Internet strange and exciting world that they want to visit but prefer the familiar comfort of living their lives off line Now.

I was I was talking with a social entrepreneur a while ago, and she assuming I was a digital tourist, she said.

How do you know how to charities get money or donations from older people like you.

I told her about a charity I support, I said.

Every fall they send me a glossy annual report and in this annual report is filled with facts and figures, lists of major donors and, uh, stories of things that they've done over the last couple of years.

They have a little piece of paper, and they asked me to write down my gift, put down my credit card number or, if I, like, send the back of paper check.

There's even a little envelope included, so I could mail it all back and they gave me a little fridge magnets so I can think about them Every time I go get a snack, I said to her, You see, I asked you to donate in this way.

How would you look at it?

And she said, Well, they killed some trees, turned it into paper, covered it and colorful but toxic ing that's hard to recycle and shifted out to me on a carbon belching truck.

It's filled with stories about other people and old news with all these paper processes.

I wondered whether or not my gift was actually going to do any of the work and solve the problem, and they asked me to write down my credit card number and risk having somebody steal it.

Or I could send them a paper check like Grandma used to use who uses checks anymore.

And how do you recycle that little fridge magnet thing?

Is that metal or plastic or what?

I said, I guessing that's a miss.

The point about this is not to malign either group, but to point out the really significant differences in the way fundraising techniques that work for one group of citizens don't work for another.

Older people are frequently digital tourists.

They prefer to engage with the charity offline, using male or a charity event.

This is important because individually they're some of the largest donors.

Other people, and especially younger people, prefer to interact with a charity digitally thes digital citizens there, now the largest component of our population.

Unfortunately, charities haven't been adjusting their fundraising techniques in order to work with them.

So what we need is a fundamentally a new approach to how to get digital citizens to become digital donors.

Now, one of the most important things that a donor say they want is to understand the impact of their gift, and they want transparency.

They want to understand how the charity spent the money.

The challenge is, if you give $25 to a charity that has an annual budget of millions, it doesn't feel like you made much of a difference.

And it's really hard to know exactly what that money would have been spending time.

So one of things charities air doing is adopting a divide and conquer approach where the use digital technology to talk about their work is a series of smaller projects.

Each one of them has a much smaller goal and so, therefore, feels like it's more achievable if a donor has now choices about what they could fund and will no more clearly how their money will be used.

If the charity follows up and tells the donor the impact or the completion of the story, the donor will not only get a sense of completion that got that done, but they'll also feel like they actually made a difference.

They may even want to give again the challenges that this shift from major projects to micro projects intensifies.

The funding squeeze the target audience for it is digital citizens.

The big challenge with it is, how do we get these donors to give Maur?

No.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did some research, and what they've discovered is that first glance a bit counterintuitive.

They said that if you want to get someone to give more over the course of a year, the best thing for you to do is to ask for substantially last money but to ask for more often.

If we think about this in terms of the happy train, happiness tried effect, it starts to make some sense.

If I make a small gift, I get a small amount of feel good of the good hormones.

If I make a gift this 10 times bigger, I don't get 10 times as much good feeling.

So in order to make this work, what we have to do is encourage donors to gate make these micro gifts on a regular basis, because what that does is our brains start to pump out a little bit of the happiness trifecta each time, and the aggregate experience is much better as well.

The dopamine actually helps us anticipate the good feelings we're going to get.

And so, therefore, helps make giving habit.

Okay, so that's all well and good.

But how do we get digital donors to give multiple times?

I mean, this is an e commerce.

We just can't send them a bonus gift every time they give us a gift.

That's kind of defeats the purpose and then get mad at us anyway, for for wasting their money.

But fortunately, the solution to this is surprisingly simple.

What we've discovered is that while telling the donor the impact of their gift is good, telling them an entertaining back story about it and then keeping them updated on the progress is much better.

It costs the charity almost nothing and yet scales up to huge numbers of donors.

Let me give you an example.

So imagine one of your friends shared the story with you and social media.

Apollo is a guy doc who's being training to help someone who can't see the charity needs help funding Apollo strain.

It takes two years, and it costs about $35,000.

In order to get that done, the charity starts a crowdfunding campaign that tells the story of Apollo's journey in a very important part of this is it tells the impact result.

What's gonna happen in the end once this happens, and in this case is that a Paula will end up having his partner for life whose own life will be transformed by his arrival.

You're asked to make a small donation.

You go.

Hey, I can spare 10 box and donate to help Apollo accomplish his mission.

Couple weeks go by and you get an email from the charity.

It's Ah, photo of Apollo hanging out with one of his friends.

Bravo.

They didn't ask you to donate.

It's just a show and tell.

It's the kind of thing that you share with your friends.

If this was your puppy, so you search the charity's campaign site, you find Bravo's campaign and you follow it.

So you get updates about her, too, and you share with a couple of your friends in case they can help contribute couple weeks go by, you get another email story says Apollo is eating like a horse.

It cost $20 just to feed them for four days.

If anyone out there completes help feed this ravenous beast, please make a small donation.

You think I could spare 20 bucks and helped to give again?

I've just made multiple donations to the same small project.

A week goes by.

We get another email.

It's a photo of big stacks of dark food with a little caption says.

Apollo likes his food things.

Now, when charity's share stories like this, they're promoting transparency there, showing you how your money was used.

And the donor gets an idea that even making a small gift can have a tangible impact.

Further, it gives what's called social proof that other people are also helping to move this project forward.

It's been validated by the community, so three weeks go by.

No email.

You check the website to find out how your puppy is doing, and the trainers have been posting videos of their sessions.

You really like the work that Sharma, one of the trainers, is doing with Apollo.

She's amazing in the way she helps him, and it shows how much time is spent actually doing this training work.

So now you have an understanding of how expensive it is, why it's so expensive to train a guide dog.

So you share that with your friends because he went them.

See why you're so excited about your puppy project.

This kind of episodic, incremental storytelling goes on entire time for Apollo's journey, and it ends up in Cullman ease with Apollo, meeting his new life partner, Grace and Going Home.

What you've just heard is what's known as a hero's journey.

It's a common, archetypal story in theater and movies.

Apollo's our hero.

He has a mission.

He's gonna be a guardian angel for someone who needs his help.

We have a plot.

Training will be full of ups and downs.

As it goes, we have a supporting cast.

Sharma, the trainer graced the new life partner, may even have some villains.

Don't get me started on those office cats.

We have some setbacks that hot, juicy state dis mysteriously disappeared from the dining room table.

We can have some challenges.

Some dogs like playing in mud puddles, but don't like taking a bath, and we can have some small triumphs.

Apollo helped Grace avoid a dangerous traffic situation during training, and in the end we end up with a climactic final scene, a polo going home with grace.

That was a real tear jerker through all of this.

Through all the social sharing, Apollo ends up with a huge audience and group who, through a series of small contributions, have helped make him achieve his mission.

I hope what you can see is that philanthropic storytelling can be entertaining as well as impactful.

It enables charities to work with digital donors and harnesses our love of stories in our biological feedback mechanisms to help make giving a habit.

Now, I admit, Apollo Story is particularly compelling compared to other causes.

But this same technique works for all sorts of different kind of projects.

The secret is in the quality and variety of the storytelling.

There's many different ways to tell a story.

In visual entertainment, we have different genres.

We have action adventure, science fiction, romantic comedies in philanthropic entertainment.

We also have genres disaster recovery, environmental issues, poverty reduction.

The lists on both sides are huge.

We can currently browse hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows with our Internet connected fingers, and when we find one we like, we tend to binge watch them.

What if we could find a similar size list of charitable projects around the world where we could discover entertaining stories that we want to support and where we can make a difference and we participate because that makes us feel good.

We could end up binge watching charity for good.

So if you will binge watching charity feels good and does good for our society and because of the hormonal benefits is also good for us, as as a donor and, uh, consumer demand, the charity's tell you.

Detailed stories about the projects that you support and how your money is used offer to give them more money if you'll do it.

If we can do that, we can re imagine philanthropy and change the way the charity is funding philanthropy.

Now that's entertainment.