Why Is It Easier to Buy Something Than to Help Someone?
Every day, people encounter suffering they would genuinely like to help address.
Then the moment passes.
Not necessarily because they do not care. Often, there is simply too much distance between the impulse to help and knowing what to do next.
Consumer technology has spent decades closing that distance.
One click buys a product. One tap orders dinner. Platforms obsess over every step between intention and action: what makes someone stop, what builds trust, where people hesitate, and what makes them follow through.
Buying has been relentlessly designed.
Has giving?
The social sector has inherited a great deal of friction without necessarily deciding which parts are useful. Donation journeys can be cumbersome. Organizations struggle to communicate where money goes and what it makes possible. Stories designed to provoke generosity can unintentionally reduce people to their hardest moments. Technology is often built to process a transaction rather than create a meaningful experience between someone who wants to help and people doing the work.
That makes giving a design problem.
But removing friction is only half of it.
Some friction exists for good reasons.
A moment of reflection can prevent impulsive or poorly informed giving. Consent matters when telling another person’s story. Accountability takes time. Trust cannot always be reduced to a five-star rating or a conversion metric. And optimizing entirely around the donor’s emotional experience can reproduce the very power dynamics that good development practice is trying to change.
So the challenge is not simply to make generosity work more like e-commerce.
It is to ask:
What should be frictionless, and what should never be?
Answering that requires people who rarely design together.
Product designers understand how experiences shape behavior. Behavioral scientists study the distance between intention and action. Storytellers understand attention and emotion. Frontline organizations understand what generosity looks like from the receiving end. Communities themselves know the difference between being seen as people with agency and being turned into someone else’s reason to give.
What happens when all of those perspectives shape the same experience?
This session will explore what it would take to apply some of the creativity and engineering attention devoted to commerce to generosity, without turning solidarity into another transaction to optimize.
Discussion Group Leaders
- Melinda McKay is a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Sciences for Better Health. She advances behavioral science approaches to strengthen health and education programs and translate strategy into effective systems change.
- Rania Elessawi is Social Behavior Change for PHC Specialist at UNICEF, advancing rights-based social and behavior change approaches that strengthen primary healthcare systems, institutions, and communities.
- Tara Todras-Whitehill is CEO at TW Storytelling Agency, advancing social impact through visual storytelling that helps organizations communicate complex global issues and inspire action.
- Sonam Singh is Director of Marketing and Insights at Watsi, advancing access to life-changing healthcare through strategic storytelling, insights, and campaigns that inspire action.
What to expect
A cross-disciplinary conversation bringing product designers, technologists, behavioral scientists, storytellers, fundraising practitioners, nonprofit leaders, and community perspectives into the same room.
The discussion will move between two questions.
First: how do we make it easier for people who want to help to actually act?
And second: how do we make sure the experience we design respects the dignity, agency, consent, and priorities of the people on the other side?
Participants will examine where giving currently breaks down, which lessons from consumer technology are genuinely useful, where those lessons become dangerous, and what a better experience of generosity could look like.
Bring frustrations, experiments, failures, and ideas rather than polished presentations.
Who this is for
This session is for product designers, technologists, behavioral scientists, fundraising and communications professionals, platform builders, nonprofit leaders, storytellers, community organizations, and anyone interested in why acting on the impulse to help can still be so difficult and what thoughtful design could do about it.
What you will get out of it
- A framework for thinking about giving as a design challenge, from the first moment of attention through trust and action
- Insights from product design and behavioral science about what helps people move from intention to action
- A clearer distinction between friction that gets in the way and friction that protects consent, reflection, accountability, and trust
- Perspectives on designing generosity around the dignity and agency of communities rather than exclusively around donor conversion
- New connections between designers, technologists, storytellers, and development practitioners who rarely get to solve these problems together