Researchers are urging charities to ensure they are using a consistent ‘emotional tone’ across the imagery and language used in the content of their campaigning.

They found donors are less likely to give to campaigns with different tones used, such as those with positive messages of hope in the text accompanied by images of people in distress.

Similarly campaigns with a message that ‘your donations can save thousands from death by starvation’ accompanied by people looking happy, were similar ineffective.

“Participants were exposed to donation requests featuring different combinations of emotional images and messages and then were asked to decide how much they wanted to donate to each, say researchers.

“The results revealed that, when attempting to encourage greater levels of charitable giving, consistency mattered. When the emotional imagery matched the tone of language used in an appeal participants were likely to donate a greater amount.

“Furthermore, the effect was the same whether the appeals were consistent in negativity (urgent language with distressing images) or positivity (hopeful language with smiling faces).”

The study has been carried out by the Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University’s Dr Alex Genevsky, alongside PhD candidate Ting-Yi Lin and academics from US universities.

Experiments used involved donors being given a real budget to donate or keep for themselves before exposing them to a variety of charity campaigns.

“We really wanted to include experiments with real donations, not only hypothetical ones,” said Dr Genevsky.

“When people know their choice will give money to charity, their behaviour carries more weight, and the results are more reliable.

“We saw that, whether positive or negative, charitable appeals are most effective when their emotional elements matched in tone.”

Psychology behind consistency

The study also looked at why consistency was so important to donors by analysing their brain activity when viewing campaigning.

“The data from these scans revealed that charitable appeals that were consistent in imagery and language activated the nucleus accumbens, the reward centre of the brain, creating a positive emotional experience,” say researchers.

“This in turn prompted participants to make a greater level of donations.”

Their research concludes that “by taking simple steps to keep messaging consistent across language and visuals, organisations stand to gain a far better response from their audience, raising more money for their causes”.

They add that “such adjustments do not require big budgets to be actioned” which “is crucial for the charity sector in particular which often works under tight finances”.

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