I Wrote This Just for You

An experienced fundraiser like you wouldn't' be fooled by a lead like that. Would you?

Actually, yes, you probably would, if only for a moment.

We all want to believe we're special. Even when we know better, we still want someone to tell us we are.

It's one of the least special things about us. We all feel that way. So when you tell a donor or prospect he or she is unique, most of the time it's exactly what he or she wants to hear.

Alex Stone, author of "Fooling Houdini," says there's an "astonishing eagerness with which people will embrace stock personality sketches as unique portraits."

It's easy for people to see themselves in generic personality descriptions, because they filter out all the parts that either don't apply to them or they don't want to hear.

Think about reading your daily horoscope in the paper. How many times have you thought, "Of course, I don't believe this stuff, but it's amazing how accurate this one is!"

Back in 1948, a psychologist named Bertram Forer gave copies of a personality profile to a group of test subjects. They all got exactly the same profile, yet each of the subjects was convinced that what he or she read was written specifically about him or her.

E. E. Cummings's 1958 poem, "Maggie and Milly and Molly and May," inadvertently says the same thing:

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourselves we find in the sea.

At first glance the line is about how each of us is at one with nature. But when you look closer it also says we tend to believe that something as impersonal and universal as the sea somehow speaks directly to us.

You might have written, "Dear Friend, you have been selected ..." a thousand times. Yet when you see it in a letter written to you, there's that split second where you want to believe it.