Fundraising’s relationship with emotion is confused in a very specific way. Everyone agrees emotion matters, but the sector keeps treating emotion as if it were the mechanism rather than the medium. Feel something and people will act, lead with the heart and the money will follow. That framing has produced a lot of copy that is emotionally loud but behaviorally weak.

A recent academic paper analyzing roughly 1,000 GoFundMe campaigns related to Gaza is useful because it narrows the question. Instead of asking whether emotion matters, it asks how emotion shows up in language and which patterns are associated with campaigns that actually raise money. The findings are solid as far as they go but where they stop is where things get interesting.

Here’s the first set of useful but incomplete findings,

• Successful campaigns tend to contain both negative and positive emotional signals.
  • Negative emotions like grief, fear, remorse, and disappointment are common.
  • So are positive emotions like pride, optimism, approval, and desire.
• The authors frame this as evidence that different emotions play different roles in persuasion.

We agree, but we would sharpen that claim considerably.

For starters, negative emotion is not the goal, it’s an (not “the”) entry condition. It can create a psychological state that increases the chance for empathy if the situation feels real enough to merit it. But negative emotion on its own does very little, feeling bad rarely produces action. More often, it produces distance, overwhelm, or quiet disengagement.

This is because behavior doesn’t come from emotion, it comes from the resolution of it and this is where positive emotion comes into play, not as uplift for its own sake, and not as a tonal counterweight, but as narrative movement.

A crappy situation is introduced, but it cannot be left unresolved. The appeal has to show intervention, agency, and a credible path forward. The donor is not responding to sadness or hope in isolation, they’re responding to a story that moves from harm toward repair and makes their role in that movement legible.

Emotion is not the cause of behavior, it’s the goal.  That should be a bumper sticker or t-shirt.

Here’s the second set of findings tied to word choices,

• Terms like “help” and “immediate” appear more often in unsuccessful campaigns.
• These are words fundraisers reach for when they want to sound urgent without doing the harder work of explanation. They’re vague, overused, and low-effort, signaling need without context and pressure without clarity.
• The data suggest that this kind of language weakens persuasion rather than strengthening it.
• By contrast, concrete language performs better.
  • “Emergency” outperforms “immediate.” Not because it is more emotional, but because it anchors urgency in an external condition rather than a demand being placed on the donor.
  • Specificity creates imagery and imagery creates understanding.

• Solidarity language shows the same pattern.
  • Broad terms like “together,” “community,” or “support” do not meaningfully differentiate successful campaigns from unsuccessful ones.
  • What does show up more often in campaigns that perform well are words that signal coordination and capability. “Team.” “Collaboration.” “Aid.” These are words that imply something organized and competent is happening, not just something heartfelt.

The final set of findings is tied to pronoun usage.

• The study carefully measures first-person singular, first-person plural, second-person, and third-person usage and finds that none of them, on their own, predict success.

That conclusion is correct, and it is also incomplete.  We know pronouns matter, but not as a frequency game. They matter as narrative structure.

In practice, we often begin in the third person, telling someone else’s story, usually anchored in the past. This establishes distance, perspective, and credibility. It signals that the situation exists independently of the appeal. Then comes a transition as the signer appears. and the timeline moves forward and the voice shifts to first- and second-person pronouns.

First person feels like a real conversation (think about how many times you use “I” in a conversation), second person establishes relatedness and conversational norms.  Pronouns function as markers of role change and plot movement, not as a tally or stylistic garnish.

Strategy is not in how often you say “you”, it’sis in when you say it and what has already been established by the time you do. Pronouns work when they signal a shift in agency and perspective, not when they are evenly distributed across copy.

The broader takeaway is that both emotion and language features are routinely misunderstood because they’re treated as levers rather than as components of a system. The research shows what tends to be present in successful campaigns. Our work is about how those elements are assembled into narratives that move, resolve, and invite participation without coercion.

Most weak fundraising is not under-emotional, it’s under-structured.

Kevin