Donate Positive & Negative Right for Charity

Marketers soliciting charitable contributions via emotional appeals need to determine the optimal blend of positive and negative in campaigns. How much to show smiling children and a message of gratitude for the positive impact of past contributions? How much to show sad children alongside a message that failure to contribute endangers lives of kids like these? Which objectives are best achieved with text saying that the healthy animals or lush landscapes shown in the photos are due to donations from people similar to the person viewing the solicitation? And which objectives are best achieved by text saying that the dead animals and damaged landscapes shown are because people failed to step up to help?
     Researchers at Complutense University of Madrid used such materials to evaluate study participants’ reactions. The study is distinctive and the conclusions more trustworthy because in addition to the behavioral measures of willingness to donate, neuropsychological data were gathered. Analyses of participants’ eye movements and their brain waves—electroencephalogram tracings—were interpreted to assess the attention paid to the solicitations and the impacts on emotional arousal from the solicitations.
     The overall conclusions provide guidance for when to use each type of appeal. Employ a negative appeal when your main objective is to increase donations in the short term. Those solicited will contribute in an effort to ease their negative feelings stimulated by the ad. But if your main objective is to engage the person for the longer-term, such as to enroll in monthly giving, use a positive appeal.
     The results also have implications for placement of emotion-arousing stimuli in the images and text of a printed solicitation: People spend more time exploring the text area when the ad is positively-toned and more time exploring the image area when the ad is negatively-toned.
     Generally, the positivity of an attractive solicitor will increase contributions. But a University of Alberta study found an exception to that rule. The researchers set up a set of fictitious websites on which visitors were asked to financially sponsor a child from a developing country.
     When the children were portrayed as having severe needs, facial attractiveness made no difference in the willingness to help. But when the level of need was not severe, people demonstrated less compassion for attractive than for unattractive children. The researchers attribute this effect to people assuming that attractive children would be better able to recruit help on their own.

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