It’s OK to Write Fundraising That’s Emotional

If you’ve ever written a fundraising piece you knew was going to work, only to have someone in the room say “this is too emotional” – I feel you.

And I want to give you a couple tools to help you get your great fundraising approved.

Because what has happened to you is pretty common: a Fundraiser drafts an appeal that’s vivid, urgent, and emotionally honest.  They send it around for review.  And someone – usually program staff, or the branding lead, or a senior leader – pushes back: “This is too emotional.  Donors will feel manipulated.  We need to tone it down.”

Even though every word is true!

What makes this objection so hard to argue against is that it sounds reasonable.  Even ethical.  Nobody wants to feel like they’re being manipulative, or be accused of being manipulative.  And the person raising the objection usually holds real authority and means well – they understand the work deeply and they care about how the organization shows up in the world.

So the piece gets toned down.  And it raises less money.  And the Fundraiser feels frustrated.

But here’s why you want emotion in your fundraising.  More than 70 years of head-to-head testing & research on giving consistently shows that people give for emotional reasons, the vast majority of the time:

• One well-known study compared donations in response to images of a sad child, a happy child, and a neutral child.  Same need.  Same ask.  Same beneficiary.  The sad-child version raised donations from 77% of viewers.  The happy-child and neutral-child versions?  52% each.  When there’s less emotion, there’s less giving.
• After the Notre Dame fire in 2019, donors from around the world sent hundreds of millions of unsolicited (!) dollars to repair an old building.  Curing cancer is arguably more important – but what happened to the building was emotional, and people responded.

Emotion isn’t a flaw in giving.  Emotion is how giving works.

When you write emotionally, you’re not manipulating your donors.  You’re reminding them why they care.  The reasons they got involved in the first place were emotional – and the most respectful thing you can do is meet them in the same place they entered from.

So the next time someone in your organization calls a piece “too emotional,” here are two things worth saying – in this order – to keep the emotional version alive:

“You know everything we do and why we do it.  You’re an expert.  But our individual donors aren’t experts.  They became donors because their emotions were touched – by a story, a moment, a need.  When we tap into those same emotions in our fundraising, we’re not manipulating anyone.  We’re reminding them why they care.  What feels ‘too emotional’ to you doesn’t feel that way to a donor.  To a donor, it feels real.”

“If we change this to be the way you’d describe the work to another expert, donors will experience it as a dry lecture.  And in test after test, that approach to individual donors raises less money.  The most respectful thing we can do is meet our donors where they actually are.”

One real boundary worth naming: manipulative fundraising distorts, lies, or exaggerates.  That is NOT what we are talking about here.  We’re talking about sharing the emotions of our beneficiaries, and the emotions of our team around the work, and the emotions a donor might be feeling.  Because emotions aren’t manipulative any more than the truth is manipulative.  As long as we are telling the truth, we’re not crossing a line.

And we’re giving a gift to our donors, because we’re letting them know the full picture of what’s going on and what’s at stake.  Not a dry lecture with numbers and program details, but real lives with real consequences.

The people who became your donors did so because something touched their hearts.  Fundraising that touches their hearts again is the surest way to get them to give again.