Imagine you are a Syrian refugee fleeing your war-torn country.

Where would you flee, or would you stay? What would you take with you, limited to what you can carry? What do you feel would be the biggest challenge for you?

Could this language trigger empathy and foster inclusion and prosocial behavior? Could this be a better way to achieve these goals than trying to educate people?

As a 2017 study revealed, the resounding answer is yes. Language that puts you in someone else’s shoes is more successful in increasing positive attitudes and behavior towards people in that situation. What is more, the information treatment – trying to educate people – was ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst with respect to increasing inclusion.

I doubt this comes as much of a shock to you. After all, every creative agency, or consultant you’ve ever worked with has told you your copy needs to be “emotional.” And appeal after appeal (after “engagement” touchpoint) has told one “story” or another. And yet when it comes to results it’s been the same old story.

So, what does this mean for fundraising? Instead of trying to tell “emotional stories” to educate supporters about the plight of other people, ask them to imagine what it’d be like for them. This could be more successful in increasing responses and revenue.

An international relief organization we partnered with decided to test this empathy language in an email updating supporters on the Syrian refugee crisis.  We created three versions:

• Control
• Test 1 (empathy copy): the email started with the bold sentences in the beginning of this post
• Test 2 (empathy copy & SL): same as above plus the subject line “what if it were you?”. This was an effort to see if this language could also increase open rates.

Both test versions outperformed the control in gift conversions and revenue. Compared to the control:

– the empathy copy resulted in 68% more gift conversions in test 1 and 58% more in test 2

– the empathy copy also resulted in a 74% revenue increase in test 1 and a 78% increase in test 2

Pretty impressive! But email open rates were flat at 10% across the three emails. So the additional empathy language in the subject line wasn’t successful in increasing them.

Based on all these results, adding empathy language just in the email body is preferable –  it results in higher number of gift conversions and a comparable increase in revenue.

In other words, the simple addition of empathy language into the body of an email could increase your revenue by more than 50%. Of course, there is subtlety and nuance in how this should be applied. And it will vary by organization (after all the “one size fits all” approach doesn’t fit anyone!)

Want to try it? Contact me at kkoutmeridou@thedonorvoice.com

Hear about this and other behavioral science case studies that increased giving in our upcoming webinar on Tuesday 11 June: Beyond the Nudge: Putting Deep Behavioral Science Insights to Work for You.