Pop quiz: The following messages have what in common?

• Frances Osborne's The Bolter is an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. Buy it now.
• 75% of guests who stay in this hotel reuse their towels. Join them and reuse your towel to help save the environment.
• Any money you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl who lives in Mali, Africa.

The answer?

They all use principles of behavioral economics to influence their audience's decisions. And you can too.

Nonprofit marketers and fundraisers often base important strategic and tactical choices on thinking grounded in established theories and practices, including direct marketing and economics. But what about established psychological theories?

Enter behavioral economics.

A reaction to "rationality" -- the concept that people use reason to make choices -- behavioral economics identifies social, cognitive, and emotional factors that influence decisions.

The big takeaway? People aren't rational and we don't make rational decisions. To put it simply, we're Homer Simpsons, not Spocks.

What's more, in the nonprofit space these irrational decisions have high stakes. We're not asking people to buy a Coke. We're asking them to change the world. Their decisions matter -- a lot.

• For fundraisers, donation-making decisions can make or break our bottom lines and affect our ability to grow our reach and services.
• For program staff, decisions can lift or sink an advocacy call-in campaign.
• For politicians, decisions determine who wins and who loses.

So what's a marketer to do?

We can explore the psychological science behind decision-making and use the findings to craft more effective messages and campaigns, campaigns that will appeal to the emotional, authority-yielding, procrastinating, bacon-instead-of-salad-eating, spend-today-save-tomorrow, people we are.

A revolution in this understanding has occurred over the past few years. Books like Predictable Irrationality and Nudge reveal radical insights into human behavior that turn many of our cherished assumptions on their heads.

Some ideas to look forward too:

• Small, not big. The bigger the scale of what you're communicating, the smaller the impact on your audience. If you want to communicate with your audience on the scale they comprehend -- a human scale -- then take the big issue your organization addresses and communicate it through stories about one person, one whale, one tree.
• Hopeful, not hopeless. One reason for thinking small is that people tend to act on what they believe they can change. If your problem seems intractable, enormous and endless, people won't be motivated to help. They want to know there is something -- anything -- that they can fix
• Peer pressure still works.Nope, it doesn't end after high school. People are more likely to do something if they know other people like them are doing it. They want to know how many others are taking action or contributing. They want to know who these fellow activists and donors are and why they care about your issue. Do this and you can leverage peer pressure for good.

Our NTC session will identify more guiding principles like these and focus on takeway lessons for marketing, fundraising, and public engagement.

Homer Simpson, Spock, and Oprah will all make appearances.