brother to this school—he was conceived the night we won the NCAA basketball
tournament. All my life I have dreamed of coming here. I was ecstatic to receive
the scholarship, and I came to school ready to take full advantage of the
opportunities it afforded me. The scholarship has improved my life in many
ways...After reading the letters, it took the givers just a week to catch up to the takers. The takers did
show some improvement, but the givers responded most powerfully, nearly tripling in weekly calls
and donations. Now, they had a stronger emotional grasp of their impact: if they brought in more
money, they could help more scholarship students like Will. By spending just five minutes reading
about how the job helped other people, the givers were motivated to achieve the same level of
productivity as the takers.
But the givers still weren’t seeing the full impact of their jobs. Instead of reading letters, what if
they actually met a scholarship recipient face-to-face? When callers interacted with one scholarship
recipient in person, they were even more energized. The average caller doubled in calls per hour and
minutes on the phone per week. By working harder, the callers reached more alumni, resulting in 144
percent more alumni donating each week. Even more strikingly, revenue quintupled: callers averaged
$412 before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2,000 afterward. One caller soared
from averages of five calls and $100 per shift to nineteen calls and $2,615 per shift. Several control
groups of callers, who didn’t meet a scholarship recipient, showed no changes in calls, phone time,
donations, or revenue. Overall, just five minutes interacting with one scholarship recipient motivated
twenty-three callers to raise an extra $38,451 for the university in a single week.* Although the
givers, takers, and matchers were all motivated by meeting the scholarship recipient, the gains in
effort and revenue were especially pronounced among the givers.
The turnaround highlights a remarkable principle of giver burnout: it has less to do with the
amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving. Researchers
have drawn the same conclusion in health care, where burnout is often described as compassion
fatigue, “the stress, strain, and weariness of caring for others.” Originally, experts believed that
compassion fatigue was caused by expressing too much compassion. But new research has challenged
this conclusion. As researchers Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer summarize, “More than all other
factors, including... the time spent caregiving, it is the perceived suffering that leads to depressive
symptoms in the caregiver.” Givers don’t burn out when they devote too much time and energy to
giving. They burn out when they’re working with people in need but are unable to help effectively.
Teachers are vulnerable to giver burnout because of the unique temporal experience that defines
education. Even though teachers interact with their students on a daily basis, it can take many years
for their impact to sink in. By then, students have moved on, and teachers are left wondering: did my
work actually matter? With no clear affirmation of the benefits of their giving, the effort becomes
more exhausting and harder to sustain. These challenges are pervasive in a setting like Overbrook,
where teachers must fight many distractions and disadvantages to stimulate the attention—let alone
attendance—of students. When Conrey Callahan was emotionally exhausted, it wasn’t because she
was giving too much. It was because she didn’t feel her giving was making a difference. “In teaching,
do I have an impact? It’s kind of dicey,” Conrey told me. “I often feel like I’m not doing anything
effective, that I’m wasting my time and I’m not making a difference.”