What Pixar Can Teach Us About Fundraising

How much Pixar have you watched over the last few weeks? We know that it’s been the school holidays, and a good Disney or Pixar film is a decent way of securing an hour and a half of relative silence… but we also know some of you have had to watch the same film about 20 times in the last fortnight.

I'm not a parent and I think it’s bad enough that my boyfriend has been obsessively singing the chorus of The Subway by Chappell Roan, so I can’t imagine how done with We Don’t Talk About Bruno you might be…

The tried and tested tactic got the Fireside team talking about our favourite Pixar films, and the Inside Out series came out on top. You'll spot some familiar faces below:

But when discussing the Inside Out series, we found a really interesting piece of trivia that we think teaches an important lesson here. When deciding which emotions to add to the sequel, there were actually three characters created that didn’t make the cut.

Find out the emotions that were cut from the making of Inside Out 2.

 Two of the three were Guilt and Shame.The consulting psychologist felt that these emotions made the film too heavy for the general audience, and made the film much less likely to be rewatched. 

This is a really valuable thing for us to consider from a fundraising perspective. Experiencing guilt and shame is so unpleasant that people don’t want to return. We can tolerate anger, we can tolerate anxiety, but guilt or shame put us off entirely.

We talk a lot about the importance of emotion in fundraising, but it’s important to pick your emotions carefully. As you read your fundraising proposals, ask yourself: would this make the Inside Out 2 cut?

Before we go, we’ll address one final feeling - Anxiety.We’re really anxiously excited about the launch of our ‘Why Companies Give (in their own words)’ research on the 11th September, and there are still free places available. Grab your ticket here. 

See you by the Fireside?

Andy

PS: Speaking of research, there’s another great piece of research being done into the problems corporate fundraisers face internally. You can have your voice heard here.