How to talk to a person 82 years old
File under: How to speak to an 82-year-old
"The average charitable donor in the U.S. is 64 years old and makes two charitable donations a year." Nat'l Philanthropic Trust, Dec. 31/'25
Good customer service is felt as love by the recipient
⬇️ below: Yes, this issue is about donor comms (somehow).
⬇️ below: Why? Maybe because you need to speak in a way that builds trust and friendship with people of a certain age and experience. Maybe because relationships blossom when you ask questions and respond to what you hear back.
What you're about to encounter is an email written to a math whiz/bridge player who's dropping her 82-year-old hands onto the first new laptop she's had in something like 15 years. She doesn't walk much (arthritis). She reigns at her kitchen table, with Lulu (friendly dogmate) by her side.
She's well-informed about the world as its grimiest, being a paid political official (ret.) in a snazzy town and before that for 30 years an urban middle-school mathematics teacher and union boss. As teachers do sometimes, she has a ready opinion on anything you can name.
Alice is an innocent abroad, though, as far as today's internet is concerned. Right now she does only 2 things ever online:
> (1 & most) email quick life updates to a single address in the UK, done as a companion to the occasional same-family phone call navigating a 5-hour time difference;
> (2) order books, crime books, especially murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie mode. She plows through crime fiction of all sorts like a horse through a meadow and prides herself on always guessing the murderer before the end.
As a social animal with many friends and interests—and with boundless curiosity but limited mobility—82-year-old Alice craves ready entertainment. She hasn't personally experienced the internet as an entertainment medium ever.
I asked her a few telling questions, like you might ask a few questions as a caring person if a donor had just shared with you an event in her life:
"Have you ever Googled anything?" ↔️ "No." ≈ "Watched video online?" ↔️ "No." ≈ "Seen any social media such as Facebook?" ↔️ "No." "Linked up with others who share your biggest passions, like UConn women's basketball?" ↔️ "No." ≈ With my prayers 🙏 , Alice, meet today's internet. It might be good to have a little hand holding... ⬇️ ]
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Dear Alice,
¶ You can subscribe to CrimeReads [•online fan mag•] for free by clicking here ... & after you do? simply scroll down.
¶ You'll see SUBSCRIBE and a nice short invite come into view. Enter your email address as indicated in the empty box. Click the "murder-red" SUBSCRIBE button to sign up for their CrimeReads emailed newsletter. From then on it will come automatically to your in-box.
¶ There is a downside to subscribing. It's name is advertising.
¶ The internet is an ecosystem with a brain, now celebrated as "artificial intelligence" or AI. [Alice knew all that. But she'd never encountered it IRL.] AI swallows all the data it can get its hands on and resells what it learns about your interests to advertisers (including fundraisers seeking the like-minded, decent people).
¶ When you subscribe to anything, your email address becomes associated with certain interests; subscribing to CrimeReads means your AI profile (which began being created the moment you purchased your first book from Amazon) now includes "you really like crime novels."
¶ Everything you DO online, every action you take, is being tracked and weighed. That's what AI is REALLY about: learning everyone's interests—learning "YOU" as precisely as possible, uniquely you, you vs. the other 7+ billion people on the planet—for, as you know and I'll confirm, marketers will pay anything to find out what makes "you" the customer tick.
¶ We're living in a different age, Alice. Been nothing like this ever before, large hanks of humanity going into high gear technologically in 2007, the annus mirabelis when Facebook went free-range and the iPhone first crashed industrialized society, putting a way-above-Star-Trek-level communications device in every hand. I can now instantly change the ambient temperature in my master bedroom from a continent far away using an app.
¶ The internet LEARNS you, builds a "YOU" profile, you as a consumer, as you SEARCH and LOOK and DO things (like clicking) on your computer. Watch yourself, is all I'm saying. There's more danger on the internet than you'd ever encounter on the street.
¶ yr ❣️ ing sib ~ t 🍅 m
The article above contains ZERO AI contributions.
A human wrote every word and selected each emoji by hand, squeezing them for pertness.
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