Appealing to a Donor’s Heart Matters in Tough Times

While nonprofit leaders have spent a lot of time worrying about how their work will change because of the current economic climate, another important shift has been overlooked: The way nonprofit organizations articulate their role in society — and their claim to support from government and private sources — is changing in subtle ways. That small change could be a very big factor in assuring the nonprofit world’s future.

All nonprofit groups ultimately have three ways to explain their purpose to the world and to articulate their case for support.

The first is a rational message focused on the effective ways charities use financial and other resources to benefit society.

The second message is moral in character and focuses on the obligations we have to care for others and the capacity of nonprofit groups to do the right thing in times of trouble.

The third nonprofit message is one anchored in emotion, and it speaks to the pride, fear, joy, and countless other emotions that donors feel.

Over time, both moral and emotional messages have fallen on hard times. The clever rationalists at nonprofit organizations have made it hard to do anything but respond to their flurry of data and reports showing their results with more of the same. The coin of the realm has become effectiveness, and the other currencies have come to be dismissed as counterfeit or at least less valuable. What I hope we see as a result of the current tough times is a resurgence of both moral and emotional messages by nonprofit organizations and a broader rebalancing of how nonprofit groups explain why they exist and why they deserve support. This would reflect the deeper meaning of nonprofit activity and build a broader and more durable basis for sustaining charitable organizations.

Rational messages are the easiest to recognize.

A rational message simply makes the case for nonprofit activity by pointing to what is produced at the end of the day. The inherent value of nonprofit organizations comes down to their ability to deliver documented results and get to their intended goal. To compete in this race, nonprofit groups must get better and better at showing that the money that enters their organizations is turned effectively and efficiently into tangible community benefits.

Over the past 20 years, there can be little doubt that the nonprofit world has been dominated by rational messages. The triumph of the rhetoric of the rationality sector has been pushed along by the growing popularity of business tools and management concepts, an increased presence of M.B.A.’s at nonprofit groups, heightened competition, and a general ratcheting up of the stakes related to nonprofit performance measurement on the part of government and private supporters.

As a result, some nonprofit managers and grant makers believe an organization is not really serious about its work unless it can communicate its intended goal through a logic model, backed up by a score card that measures performance.

In sum, nonprofit leaders almost always start with the results an organization delivers and an explanation of how a donation is connected to this concrete end. Rational messages simply depend on the acceptance of a natural link between financial support and evidence that a program “works.”

Moral messages feel very different from rational ones.

Nonprofit groups communicate moral messages by talking about obligation and duty, rather than detailed technical reports, evaluations, and other artifacts of the rational and instrumental messages.

To make the moral case for support, nonprofit groups can and do rely on the sense of responsibility to others that we all share and the obligations that come with citizenship, group identity, and membership in religious and secular communities.

A moral appeal seeks support on the basis of what a nonprofit groups stands for, and it is not guided by a cool and detached assessment of effectiveness.

A well-crafted moral message prompts supporters to see their own responsibilities and obligation to help solve public problems. Moral messages can be very persuasive. They can draw on political commitments and tap into the identity of the people to which they are directed. If rational messages hinge on programs working, moral messages are tethered to the idea that supporting nonprofit work is simply the right thing to do.

The emotional messages of nonprofit groups appeal to people through different means than either rational or moral arguments.

Nonprofit groups have the capacity to make their supporters feel fear, sadness, and guilt by exposing critical unmet needs, asking why they have been neglected, and speculating on the possible consequences of not helping. Sometimes this entails showing the pain that clients experience, and other times it involves painting a picture of what the community might look like without an organization’s critical services.

Emotional messages can be enhanced by heart-wrenching stories and pictures that shock, pain, or delight us. They connect to the human impulse to help and the raw emotions that human suffering and triumph can elicit.

So what is wrong with reason continuing to dominate how the nonprofit world understands itself and how it makes its case to the world?

The real problem is that the language of effectiveness is just one of many possible languages for nonprofit organizations, and in emphasizing it, nonprofit organizations truncate the public’s understanding of what charitable organizations do.

We tend to equate the entire nonprofit world with the results produced and documented by a select group of large, technically sophisticated organizations. In fact, nonprofit organizations include religious groups that are animated by faith and principle, political groups that are driven by belief and ideology, and a host of small charities that reflect deep commitments to specific values. Those organizations exist not just to get things done but also to enact and express our competing visions of the common good.

While all those groups may at times draw on rational messages, their value lies in their contribution to pluralism and their ability to represent our shared commitments. It is those organizations that are already honing their moral and emotional messages and finding ways to connect them to the changing economic circumstances we face.

It is likely that such messages will spread more broadly across the nonprofit landscape as unemployment rises, as homes are foreclosed, and as human suffering increases, not just at home but abroad. The tenor of the times simply makes these more immediate and visceral messages more compelling than before.

Will the rationalists, efficiency mongers, and effectiveness gurus in the nonprofit world simply pack their bags and go away as the national mood gets darker and darker? Will reason simply be shunted aside as organizations and supporters gravitate toward deeper, more personal messages and ways to connect?

Hardly. The masters of rational messages will argue that now is the time when nonprofit groups must be even better managed than ever and that objective performance standards are needed to ensure a rational and orderly flow of capital to nonprofit groups. While this sounds convincing, I suspect this argument may not dominate the nonprofit cultural landscape quite as successfully as in the past.

As the problems in our communities increase and as needs get more acute for all kinds of services, there is room for appeals and arguments that are broader than the technical and instrumental gains that nonprofit activity can generate.

Nonprofit activity can stand for something bigger, more expressive, and, yes, deeper. To mobilize support and to advance the case for charities in this time of crisis, nonprofit leaders will be able to appeal with ever greater ease to our sense of moral obligation and to our emotions.

Far from carrying us back to a dark age before the advent of reason and the triumph of evaluation and performance data, this broadening of the case for support has the potential to deepen our appreciation not just for what nonprofit organizations do on a daily basis but also for what they represent in the larger scheme of things.

Peter Frumkin is a professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service, both at the University of Texas at Austin.