Do attractive people make better fundraisers?

This is actually a thought about evidence versus assumptions. Another
example might be do arseholes make worse managers? It stems from a
conversation last night with an old friend about how job requirements
might not be the best ones.

It's an assumption that I've made that attractive people make better
fundraisers. People want to spend more time with them and listen to what
they say. That would be the logical thing perhaps. But what if the
factor wasn't the number of leads but the type of leads. The attractive
fundraiser might end up with more people taking up more of their time.
The less attractive one would get people who were interested in the
cause. They'd be able to spend more time with them and the leads would
more often turn into revenue. The revenue might be higher because the
people who they got interested as funders were genuinely interested
rather than interested for the pleasure of time spent with an attractive
person.

It's assumed that a good manager should be a good people person to build
an effective team. What if it wasn't true? I worked in a call centre and
there was a them-us mentality. We were all temporary staff with few
rights, poor pay and relatively poor conditions. Manager's attempted to
instill discipline and professional rules of condut on an unruly
workforce. They held us accountable to performance targets. It created
an atmosphere of solidarity and this may have engendered a better team
environment because people came together in their hatred of the common
enemy. It's why I'm hopeful that the change to a right-wing coalition
government in the UK will lead to positive change: people and
organisations can come together to hate the Tories. (I missed out the
Lib Dems because they're not really a political party anyway). Synergy
is a business buzzword but it's a really useful concept often lacking in
many organisations and industries.

This personal valuation of evidence versus hypothesis alone is a
fundamental scientific principle. It is pretty much one of the core
axioms of science. The paradigm of positivistic science has brought many
benefits to the world we live in. It's shift to other areas outside the
pursuit of pure knowledge improves performance and the measures of
performance are getting evermore advanced. There are other aspects which
make this sort of science difficult to use in hard to measure things
like team performance and the impact of different managerial types but
it is only a matter of time. It's much easier in areas where the measure
is simple.