Editor’s Note:  We’re bringing together professors in behavioral science and nonprofit practitioners in the first-ever DonorVoice Behavioral Symposium. The Symposium is web-based and spread over two days: 30^th September and 1^stOctober from 9-12 AM Eastern (2-5 PM UK). Wherever you are, you can join for free.  Find out more here. Roger

Our first-ever Behaviorial Symposium on Monday and Tuesday (September 30 and October 1) is going to shine some light on  the use of emotion in fundraising.

For those who are impatient and just can’t wait until Monday, here’s a  quick overview  as well as a new study on the topic.

As we all know, emotions can be powerful drivers of behavior. They motivate you to act whether  to satisfy the emotion you experience in the moment e.g. I feel hungry, so I’ll eat, or to achieve the emotional state you desire e.g. I feel sad, so I’ll help someone to feel happier.

When it comes to fundraising, a wide variety of “desired emotional states” can increase giving; people might help because they want to feel happier or proud, or to stop feeling sad or guilty. But typically only two key “in-the-moment” emotions are widely used to increase helping behavior: guilt and empathy.

Guilt is a no-no. Yes, it might stimulate giving in that moment, but the donor is left feeling pressured, angry, used. What are the chances you’d repeat something that made you feel this way?  Exactly.

While guilt doesn’t form the basis for a repeat gift, empathy might. Triggering empathy can substantially increase giving. And you can do that in two ways. The traditional way is tell an emotional story of someone in need and implicitly try to make the reader feel what that person is feeling. Not a bad way, but there might be an even  better one.

Instead of a story, or rather right before that story, ask people to put themselves in that situation and to imagine what it’d be like for them. Ask leading questions that will make them really think about it. When we tested this approach, we saw a significant increase in revenue (hear Larissa Peters present these findings on Tuesday).

Ok, guilt is bad. Empathy is good. But surely there must be other emotions beyond empathy that charities could use? What are these? And are they the same for different types of causes?

These are the questions a new field study tried to answer. Shoppers in a grocery store could choose to donate money to one of three types of causes: a welfare morality cause (e.g. Red Cross), an equality morality cause (e.g. ACLU) and a cause that had no moral element (control). With no other intervention, people were equally likely to donate to each cause (about 33% of shoppers selected each).

But then, the experimenters placed a small flyer that was subtly priming a specific emotion. The first flyer was priming gratitude with the message “who are you grateful for today?”. When gratitude was triggered,significantly more shoppers (39%) chose the fairness charity than the welfare charity (31%) or the control charity (30%).

Next, they placed a flyer that primed empathy with the message “who needs your compassion today?”. When empathy was triggered, significantly more people now selected the welfare charity (38%) than the fairness charity (32%) or the control charity (30%). Other positive emotions like love, happiness, and awe didn’t lead to any differences.

It seems that when charities are associated with specific moral objectives (either of welfare or fairness), only an emotion that is congruent with that moral objective will be successful in eliciting giving. In other words, if you’re a welfare charity trying to promote care values, empathy might be the most effective emotion for your campaign. If you’re a fairness charity trying to promote equality or justice, gratitude might be the answer for you. That’s definitely worth a test!

Hope you enjoyed this preview of the kind of insight you’ll hear at our Symposium next week.

See you there!

Kiki