The Impact Vacuum: Givers Without a Cause
A decade ago, Howard Heevner, a dynamic director of a university call center, invited me to help him
figure out how to maintain the motivation of his callers. The callers were charged with contacting
university alumni and asking them to donate money. They were required to ask for donations three
times before hanging up, and still faced a rejection rate exceeding 90 percent. Even the most seasoned
and successful callers were burning out. As one experienced caller put it: “I found the calls I was
making to be extremely difficult. Many of the prospects cut me off in my first couple of sentences and
told me they were not interested in giving.”
I assumed that the takers were dropping like flies: they wouldn’t be as committed as the givers.
So during training, I measured whether each caller was a giver, matcher, or taker. In their first month
on the job, the takers were bringing in an average of more than thirty donations a week. Contrary to
my expectation, the givers were much less productive: they were struggling to maintain their
motivation, making fewer calls and bringing in under ten donations a week. I was mystified: why
were the callers who wanted to make a difference actually making the least difference?
I got my answer one day when I paid a visit to the call center, and noticed a sign one of the callers
had posted above his desk:
DOING A GOOD JOB HERE
Is Like Wetting Your Pants in a Dark Suit
YOU GET A WARM FEELING BUT NO ONE ELSE NOTICESAccording to my data, the caller who proudly displayed this sign was a strong giver. Why would
a giver feel unappreciated? In reflecting on this sign, I began to think that my initial assumption was
correct after all: based on the motivational structure of the job, the givers should be outpacing the
takers. The problem was that the givers were being deprived of the rewards they find most
energizing.
The takers were motivated by the fact that they were working at the highest-paying job on campus.
But the givers lacked the rewards that mattered most to them. Whereas takers tend to care most about
benefiting personally from their jobs, givers care deeply about doing jobs that benefit other people.
When the callers brought in donations, most of the money went directly to student scholarships, but
the callers were left in the dark: they had no idea who was receiving the money, and how it affected
their lives.
At the next training session, I invited new callers to read letters from students whose scholarships
had been funded by the callers’ work. One scholarship student named Will wrote:
When it came down to making the decision, I discovered that the out-of-state
tuition was quite expensive. But this university is in my blood. My grandparents
met here. My dad and his four brothers all went here. I even owe my younger