Nonprofit Marketing: How To Raise More Money By Tapping Into Emotions

By Dr. Abishek Allam

In the vast majority of circumstances, and for the vast majority of people, emotion is the primary decision-making system. We like to imagine that we are rational, disinterested observers and deciders, but significant research shows the opposite is true. 

Why Are Emotions Effective in Marketing?

You can take your marketing efforts to the next level by coming to better understand the role of emotion in human choice and the ways in which advertising can activate those emotions.

The human mind is remarkably reactive: an enormous range of emotional vocabulary can be evoked with words, pictures, and music. Our ability to evoke specific emotions through the arts is a true monument to humanity. Art is one of the most highly developed of all human skills.

Marketing uses the arts, skillfully pushing and pulling to channel unknown individuals (customers) into seeing the utility and emotionality of a product, service, or idea. The customer’s participation is not just invited, but actively courted and encouraged. Passive interest is sufficient, but the true apotheosis of marketing comes when a prospective customer is sufficiently inspired to spend their own hard-earned money. It is an art, a science, a skill, and a game. Marketers know that the two best ways to move the market are the appeal to rational interest and the appeal to emotion. The appeal to emotion is universally accepted to be the stronger of the two.

Is an Emotional Connection as Effective in Fundraising Marketing?

Fundraising and marketing are only slightly different in tone and application. Fundraising is, out of necessity, more abstract than marketing. Marketing asks if you want something, fundraising asks if you think other people would want something enough to bother doing it.

Let’s say you are trying to market a line of clothing that you made and feel strongly about. When you market the clothing line, you are asking people if they want the physical clothes you’ve made. When you fundraise, however, to pay for the inevitable expenses and opportunity cost of creating these clothes, you are asking people if they think your company should exist....and perhaps even how big they think your company should be. 

Notice where the emotional connection falls now. This is no longer about clothes; it is about the people that make the clothes. This impulse is even stronger in nonprofits, as there is really nothing to “sell” except the feeling of positivity and inclusiveness that comes from being of service to one’s community, whatever that community may be. The emotional connection is everything. This is especially true for nonprofit endeavors, as there is nothing to traditionally "market."

How Can You Use Your Emotional Insights to Raise Funds?

Take a look at this commercial for organ donation. This is a pure appeal to emotion, with practically no intellectual information presented whatsoever. Instead, cultural touchstones are skillfully evoked – the musical cue from the film “Up” meant to evoke thought about mortality, the visual appearance of the cover to the Beatles' album “Abbey Road” designed to appeal to those of the proper age to have strong feelings about the Beatles. The commercial is completely silent about the realities and technicalities of organ donation, simply presenting one actor in the place of the other and allowing the dog, the audience’s avatar, to make the emotional leap. Organ donation is, by definition, of no direct benefit to those who donate. The appeal to positive emotions, such as the desire to do good in the world, the desire to help others, and the desire to be remembered well after one’s inevitable end, is the entire foundation of this advertisement, and it is devastatingly effective.

I urge all of us at the helm of marketing and fundraising to be judicious, merciful, and compassionate as we appeal to human emotion. Temptation abounds. The need for gratification is real and cannot be contained by being denied, but it certainly can be channeled into positive growth and self-improvement. Building an enterprise means thinking logically and methodically about how to make something prosper so that it is beneficial for the people around it, existing over a long period of time and changing gracefully as the world changes. 

Isn't this exactly what we want for ourselves? Isn't this what health looks like? The insights into emotions that come with every aspect of a business, most especially in marketing and fundraising, are the insights into mental and spiritual balance that bring us to health and happiness.

Dr. Abishek Allam is an active research scholar in Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and a writer and editor for Sunshine Behavioral Health. www.sunshinebehavioralhealth.com

Works Cited

“Art & Emotion.” EVAlab, https://aesthetics.univie.ac.at/research/art-emotion/. 

“''Become and Organ Donor'' - Emotional Commercial With Dog - ''The Man and the Dog''.”  

''Become and Organ Donor'' - Emotional Commercial With Dog - ''The Man and the Dog'', Youtube, June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1jA6eTfQso. 

“Colorado Springs Dual Diagnosis Rehab: Addiction Rehab Center in Colorado Springs, CO.”

Sunshine Behavioral Health, https://www.sunshinebehavioralhealth.com/colorado/colorado-springs/dual-diagnosis-treatment/. 

“Fundraising vs. Marketing: What's the Difference?” CauseVox, 22 Oct. 2020,

https://www.causevox.com/blog/fundraising-vs-marketing/. 

Garcia-Garcia Ph.D., Manuel. “The Role of Emotion in Human Decision-Making.” IPSOS, Sept. 2020,

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/2020-10/the-role-of-emotion-in-human-decision-making.pdf. 

Goal-Directed Behaviors in Marketing: The Role ... - Deep Blue.

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/34941/1_ftp.pdf;sequence=1. 

Kozlowski, Desirée, et al. “The Role of Emotion in Clinical Decision Making: An Integrative Literature Review.” BMC Medical Education, BioMed Central, 15 Dec. 2017,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5732402/#:~:text=Research%20confirms%20emotions%20constitute%20a%20potent%20and%20pervasive,emotions%20can%20compromise%20cognitive%20processing%20%5B%204%20%5D. 

Paxton, Pamela, et al. “Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits?” New Jersey Research Community, American Sociological Association,

https://www.researchwithnj.com/en/publications/does-use-of-emotion-increase-donations-and-volunteers-for-nonprof.