In 2016, I caught two guests for What a Relief! right before they walked into a fundraising dinner in Virginia: Mohamed Khairullah, then mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, who traveled to Syria for relief work, and Syrian-American spoken-word artist Omar Offendum.
Mohamed told us that 66% of Syria’s population had been displaced, become refugees, or been killed or injured. And I asked the question every nonprofit communicator eventually runs into: how do you even begin to help the average person understand how big that number really is?
Omar’s answer was honest. People, he said, are losing sight of how to even understand something like this.
Ten years later, that exchange is still the best summary I know of the central problem in nonprofit storytelling. Big numbers don’t make people care more. Often, they make people care less.
The science: why big numbers numb
Psychologist Paul Slovic has spent decades studying what he calls psychic numbing: our feelings simply don’t scale with the size of a tragedy. One death moves us. A million registers as a statistic.
In one well-known experiment, researchers gave people a chance to donate to Save the Children. Some saw the story and photo of Rokia, a seven-year-old girl from Mali. Others saw statistics about food shortages affecting millions. Rokia’s story raised far more. But here’s the finding that should change how every nonprofit writes an appeal: when people saw Rokia’s story together with the statistics, they gave less than they did for Rokia alone.
It gets starker. A follow-up study found that people felt less and gave less to help two children than to help one. Researchers call it compassion fade. It doesn’t take millions to numb us. It starts at two.
Then what are statistics for?
In my guide to nonprofit impact measurement, I argued for pairing numbers with stories. I still believe that, but the research sharpens where each belongs.
- Stories move people to act. In the appeal itself, lead with one person, and keep the big numbers out of the way.
- Statistics build trust. Annual reports, grant proposals, board decks, and follow-up thank-yous are where your numbers prove the pattern is real and the money was well spent.
Same organization, same data, different moments. The mistake is dropping a crisis-sized statistic into the middle of a story that was working.
How to tell a crisis without numbing your donors
My What a Relief! guests were already doing this instinctively. Here’s what I learned from them.
1. Find one person and stay with them. Reem El-Khatib, who led Islamic Relief USA’s Syria committee, spent her vacation teaching martial arts to refugee children near the Syrian border. She told us about one girl who should have been in 7th grade but was in 3rd, because the war had taken four years of school from her. Bright, full of energy, working to catch up. That one girl says more than any enrollment statistic.
2. Use the detail nobody would think to invent. Mohamed described children in Syria who built a fire in a park during the day and didn’t go home at night, because their concrete houses were colder than sleeping outside. You can’t forget a detail like that. Specific, unexpected details signal truth in a way adjectives never can.
3. If you need a number, shrink it to human scale. “66% of the population” is abstract. “Two out of every three people you’d pass on the street” is something you can picture. Reem framed the war’s length the same way: soon there would be five-year-olds in Syria who had never known a single day of peace. That’s a number, but it’s a number about a child.
4. Let artists do what data can’t. Omar traveled to those dinners to tell the story through spoken word, because art reaches people statistics can’t. Poetry, music, photography, and short video aren’t decorations on an appeal. For big, overwhelming crises, they may be the most effective part.
5. Give people something small and concrete to do. Numbing thrives on the feeling that nothing you do will matter. “Help end the crisis” is paralyzing. “Keep one child warm this winter” is doable. Scale the ask to the story, not to the size of the problem.
What this looks like in practice
Before your next appeal goes out, run this quick check:
- Is there one named (or clearly described) person at the center?
- Is there at least one specific detail a reader will remember tomorrow?
- Have I moved the big statistics out of the appeal and into the report or the thank-you?
- Is the ask sized to one person or one family, not the whole crisis?
- Is there a way to show it: a photo, a voice, a short clip, a piece of art?
The same thinking applies to live formats. When we ran our 24-hour Giving Tuesday stream, the moments that landed weren’t the numbers. They were the voices from field offices.
The number is real. The person is what people remember.
Syria’s story has changed in many ways since those 2016 conversations. The lesson from them hasn’t. Nonprofit storytelling isn’t about making people understand the full scale of suffering. Nobody can hold that. It’s about helping them see one person clearly enough to act.
Omar was right: people lose sight of how to understand something that big. Our job isn’t to make them understand the whole thing. It’s to make sure they don’t lose sight of the girl who’s working her way back from 3rd grade.