Remember the last time you were with a loved one who was feeling sad or hopeless? Most likely, you also felt a bit sad, in other words, you empathized with them.

But did you know there are two different forms of empathy?

Emotional (affective) empathy is all about sharing another person’s feelings and building an emotional connection. It has three parts: you feel the same emotion as the other person; you become distressed in response to their pain; you feel compassion towards the person.

Cognitive empathy is about taking another person’s perspective and gaining a better understanding of their experience. It’s the capacity to place ourselves in their shoes by imagining what it’d be like to be in that situation. Cognitive empathy allows us to understand how a person feels and what they might be thinking.

Unsurprisingly, there is a positive correlation between empathy and willingness to help others. But there are many different ways one could trigger empathy in a fundraising appeal. Some of which were presented in our 1^stOnline Behavioural Symposium. Here’s a quick summary of the findings (click on headings for slides of each talk).

Erica Best – Improving acquisition; the power of one person

To a certain extent it’s in our nature to empathize with others. So just by telling a story of someone in need, you could implicitly trigger empathy and increase helping behavior.

This isn’t a new finding, at least not in the academic world. It also has a name: the (single) identifiable victim effect. Focusing on one person is more effective in eliciting donations than sharing the big numbers of people in need. The reason? A story is more successful in creating an emotional, empathetic response while statistics might “numb” your feelings (an effect known as psychic numbing).

No Kid Hungry decided to test this with their acquisition and existing audience. Compared to their control letter which was more organisation and statistics focused, they tested a letter that told the story of a hungry kid. They saw a lift in response rates and average gift in both audiences.

Next, they wanted to see whether an image of that child could increase giving even further. Using the story letter as the control, they created two test versions: in the first they added an image of that child in the letter and in the other they added that image on the outer envelope. Both test versions increased response rates and average gifts even more.

Interestingly, and what seems to be in support of the single identifiable victim effect, the positive impact of a story on giving disappeared when the letter told 3 stories instead of one.

Takeaway: test a story against your more organizational, or statistic focused campaigns. Bear in mind that the number of stories might matter.

David Reinstein – Emotional empathy inducing images

David’s talk mostly focused on the effect of impact information on giving. But in some of the experiments he shared, there was some additional evidence on empathy’s ability to increase giving.

In a series of 6 different studies, they tested how the addition of the emotional picture on the left would affect actual donations. They found a strong positive effect of the image on both donation rates and amounts.

In a separate study, participants had to choose which cause they’d like to support between guide dogs and river blindness. Half of participants were also shown this picture of a 12 year-old girl with corneal blindness.

Results were conflicting. The image significantly reduced donation rates and amounts to Guide Dogs but seemed to increase donations to River Blindness. My guess on what happened? Guide dogs may need imagery that speaks to the specific services they provide e.g. an image of a blind person not being able to cross the street. Maybe an image doesn’t only need to be emotional but also congruent with the cause. This is just my hypothesis though which remains to be tested.

Takeaway: an empathy-inducing image could be effective in increasing donations. But not all images will work. Instead of relying on your instinct, test various images to find the most effective for your cause and audience.

Larissa Peters – Getting repeat donations; emotion & impact at work

So far we’ve looked at what I call implicit ways of triggering empathy. That is, you rely on human behavior to empathize just by sharing another person’s story and/or image. But you could also increase giving by explicitly triggering empathy.

That’s what Catholic Relief Services did in one of their emails to existing supporters. The email was about the Syrian refugee crisis and compared to the control, the test version started with the following sentences:

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?

The result? A 68% increase in average gift and a 74% increase in revenue.

Takeaway: test asking supporters to imagine what that situation would be like for them with leading questions or descriptions. Of course, there’s subtlety and nuance in how this should be applied and it will vary from organization to organization.

Interested in finding out more or testing some of these ideas? Email me at kkoutmeridou@thedonorvoice.com

Kiki