Marina Jones has had a distinguished career in arts marketing and fundraising. She began her career in theatres, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, the Lyric Hammersmith and the Polka Theatre. She was then at the Royal Opera House for 13 years, before joining English National Opera three years ago as Executive Director for Development and Public Affairs.

Arts can be agents of social change. We have a programme called ENO Breathe, which works with people with long COVID. It uses the skills that opera singers use when they’re singing to retrain people’s breathing. It can help with the symptoms associated with long COVID, particularly anxiety and breathlessness, to be self-managed better. I’ve seen first-hand someone say, I was on the point of suicide until I did this programme.

I believe in using behavioural science in fundraising. I was involved with the world’s largest experiment using decision science with the arts and cultural charities, which was a joint project between National Arts Fundraising School and co-funded by the Arts Council. It brought together 11 different arts and cultural charities to look at the principles of decision science and how they’re used.

Testing is all-important. You start with a hypothesis: these are the principles, this is how they’ve been applied, this is what we would expect a result to be from making an intervention or trying a different kind of nudge. And then you test it in real life in the field: do we see more people giving? Do we see more people engaging? And if we try something else, does that impact as well?

Anchoring is very powerful. There’s a lot of science that says, if you ask people for £1, £5, £10, people are primed and anchored on that first number. If you just reverse it and do £10, £5, £1, your average donation goes up.

It also works with the Goldilocks effect. If you’ve got three things in a row, the middle one feels more attractive. You don’t want to be too generous, you don’t want to be too mean, you want to be just right and in the middle. So, we need to learn from these sorts of insights and knowledge and think about them every time we have a donation form.

Keep it simple. When we’re really passionate about causes that we care about, we have a habit to want to go into a lot of detail. That can overwhelm supporters. Providing information that is more fluent and easier for supporters to understand how they can make a difference will ultimately bring more money.

You can see the magical impact the arts can bring. Some of my favourite moments have been when I’ve been in the theatre and it’s full of people who are coming for the first time because of a grant that’s made that happen. And then when you hear people talking about an opera or ballet going, did you see that? How did that happen? And being enchanted by the magic of it. It is very special.

Give opera a go. Opera combines the best bits of other art forms. But it can feel off-putting, and when we’re frightened of things, we don’t necessarily want to take that risk. People worry, what do you wear, what is the etiquette etc? The London Coliseum is the friendliest theatre building in the world and every time I’ve gone on my own, someone always talks to me. I think it’s historically been a gateway opera house where lots of people have had that first experience of opera. I’d say, give it a go.

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Cause & Effect is a series from Hope, in which leading figures who have been involved in building and promoting good causes tell us what they’ve learned from their experiences. Interview by Michael Isaacs.