Using Emotion to Get Your Nonprofit's Message Across

Do sad headlines and images make you more likely to support an organization by donating money? Does going negative hurt more than help, and how do we know? If we don't know, maybe just keep things positive. 

This post is an appeal to take a new approach to appeals that touch on sensitive social justice topics. Things like female genital mutilation and child sex trafficking get people wound up. Focusing on the US, sexual violence, and gun control push peoples' buttons. Fighting climate change is, well, a different case. I point out these obvious facts only to raise a concern about how we use emotion to promote social change. 

Sometimes activists use emotions effectively. That approach (appeal to emotion) seems common in campaigns dealing with issues in low-income countries (LICs), the places sometimes stilled identified as 'developing' or 'third world'. Issues that deal with vulnerable populations in the United States -children, transgender adults, the homeless - sometimes go negative. I don't know if going negative is the norm, but these appeals might lean too much on shame, guilt, or anger.

Abstract Causes Call for Practical Appeals

Are you trying to get people wound up about climate change? Do you want people to think broadly about the future of the nation, or the human race, or whatever? Appeals to emotion might not work, at all. Find values that you can appeal to - stewardship of the Earth is important to many religious Americans, for example. 

Match Appeals and Commitment Levels

Consider how much your reader knows about the organization and the cause? Are they interested? Have they barely heard of you? Is your organization focused on something that doesn't evoke strong emotions investment in the work? If you want to raise money in those cases, rely on appealing to your reader's self-interest. Remind them that donations are tax-deductible. Use a comparison to make the donation seem small. 

If the cause is one people know about and easily identify with (domestic violence and animal welfare come to mind) you can appeal to other values like justice and family and compassion to raise money. 

Emotional Appeals Cannot be Overpowering

Negative emotions like fear and shame might help move people to act, but going negative can be a mistake. If you want to make good use of emotion, try to play on positive emotions instead - incorporate a sense of mastery or control. 

Making people feel bad about being born in a wealthy society, or carried there in childhood, often creates resentment. Some people may become hostile. Efforts to make people feel bad about the grinding poverty in rural Mali or wherever might backfire. If you aren't sure the image or the language helps, instead of just upsetting people, don't use it. 

Keep it positive, mostly. Use a bit of emotion to draw us in and make this something we feel should be worked on. Appeal to values and interests in a positive way. Then you can make an appeal for a specific action: Tell us that people who eat less meat are perfectly happy (an image that reinforces the point would be a good addition) then pitch a specific suggestion. You get the idea.

If you really must use disturbing images or "shaming language" make sure you can back up that choice with numbers. What do I mean? Find evidence that these ads get more donations or signatures or whatever. Someone's probably tested these things and shared some of what they learned. 

If there is no evidence, forget it. Do something else. 

The preceding notes apply to fundraising and to social marketing communication. If you want people to change their behavior you might run into resistance because of anxiety or worry. Maybe you can reduce resistance, at least from those negative emotions, by making things easy. 

Marketing Behavior Change as a Step-by-Step Process

Another way to go, if you are selling behavior change is to offer a set of actions people can take. Help people ease into making a significant change in behavior, then offer options that are increasingly expensive in time or money, or both. An example of such steps for promoting veganism illustrate how this works:

1. Try to avoid eating all meat and dairy for one day a week.
2. Try to avoid all animal products, including honey and milk byproducts for two days.
3. Resolve to stop buying anything with leather or fur.
4. Stop eating meat, including fish and chicken, except once or twice on weekends.
5. Stop eating all animal products including eggs, dairy, and honey.

Coming up with some practical steps to take is just one part of the challenge, the easy part. The tough work involves trying to get people to go along with those lifestyle changes.

What about encouraging people to use more renewable energy? You could propose specific steps that make sense to the reader and advance your goal of getting more people using more renewable energy:

1. See if you can buy clean energy through your current electricity provider, and sign up!
2. Install solar panels on your home.
3. Get people shopping for new homes to insist on LEED homes.
4. Convince home builders, and homebuyers to go for net-zero homes, homes that produce almost all of their own energy. Most of these homes are also going to be Green Builder, Energy Star, or passive solar homes.

Less Emotion, More Action

You can use emotion to get people to take action, and you should. Ready any book on copywriting and you will learn about the value of using emotion. Go easy on the negative emotion though. Give us practical steps to take that match our existing values and interests. And, you can't do that if you don't know what our values and interests are. Do some market research.