“People give based on emotion, not facts.”

Some version of that statement is sacrosanct in marketing and fundraising.  It begs several questions, not least of which is whether emotion is the cause or the goal.  We know it to be the latter.

But today’s post is to beg another question:  what emotion?  Will any emotion do?  Positive or negative?  There is evidence that inducing positive emotions works better than negative (e.g. guilt, anger, hate).

If positive emotion, is it happiness or gratitude or compassion or empathy or love?   And does the type of cause matter, meaning can any charity take any emotion and make it work equally well?

Different charities would seem to have different moral aims.  Some are (more) about justice and equity (e.g. Amnesty, ACLU), others about social welfare (e.g. Red Cross).

• Do certain emotions work better depending on the moral aim?
• Do donors innately categorize or think about charities based on moral aim?
• And if so, does matching emotion to moral aim raise more money?

There has been academic work done to understand how different morals group together (the Big 5 of Morality, which we wrote about last week).  Additionally, work is ongoing by us (and academia) to understand how specific emotions link to specific moral categories (and how those categories link to Personality).

People are messy and complex but in predictable ways.  Our aim is to create a taxonomy of human motivation based on Identity, Personality, Psychological Needs, Morals and Emotions combined with targeting data.  It’s an ambitious goal,  but doable and the key to cracking the code on truly understanding our donors, segmenting them properly and greatly increasing income (gross and net)

We’ll be sharing more over the coming months and recruiting large brands to participate.  Here is one fascinating, proof point on the value of this taxonomy.

A field experiment tested a few hypotheses;.

• Charities do have different, innate connections to different moral aims.
• Donors do see charities this way
• Specific emotions work better based on the moral category the charity “lives” in
• Priming those emotions raises more money.

The field experiment was in a grocery store.  Shoppers were given a choice of donating money to one of three charities representing welfare morality, equality morality, or neither moral cause.  Survey work had been done to confirm that these 3 charities (which were picked by the grocery store, not the researchers) were associated with different moral aims.

In the baseline, with no intervention, shoppers were equally likely to donate among the three charities.  A subtle nudge was used in the testing phase employing a small flyer with a gratitude cue, “Who are you grateful for today?’, and separately, a compassion cue “Who needs your compassion today?”.

The chart shows significant (statistically and otherwise) effects.  The gratitude emotion clearly links to the charity that pre-testing showed was (of the three) more clearly linked to equity/justice (Loaves & Fishes charity) while Compassion clearly links to the animal rescue group (Browncoat) that was, of the three, more connected to Harm/Care and compassion.

The one that had a neutral, moral connection (youth farm project) saw no lift.

Importantly, additional testing showed that not just any positive emotion will do,  along with a few other key points.

• Compassion for social welfare and humanitarian groups raised more than invoking happiness or love. In fact, ‘love’ had no effect.
• More lift is created if the emotion message is matched with the moral message. For example, the word “compassion” plus caring language does better than just the compassion word.
• There are ways to message that don’t require literally saying “compassion”.
  1. For example, a conservation charity can talk about trees that are dying from drought (compassion) or trees that give us life (gratitude)
  2. But, the better option is determining what moral aim donors already attribute to your cause.
• Premiums can undermine all of this lift from matching moral aims to emotions. All the effects went away when a premium was offered.  This is because premiums often change the mental calculus to one of an exchange relationship and switching benefits from psychic to tangible.

In summary, discrete positive emotions motivate unique preferences and behaviors.  Compassion works best for social welfare and humanitarian causes and gratitude for justice/equity causes.

Building the fuller taxonomy to know exactly how to message by Identity, Personality, Morals and Emotion and how that differs by cause is where we’re headed.

And, importantly, we’ll also know where to find these people based on Facebook affinities (for digital work) and 3^rd party data (for direct mail).

Stay tuned.

Kevin