IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iup/wpaper/wp200804.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Persuasion in Fundraising Letters: An Interdisciplinary Study

Author

Listed:
  • Elizabeth Goering
  • Ulla Connor
  • Ed Nagelhout
  • Richard Steinberg

    (Department of Economics, Indiana Unviersity-Purdue University Indianapolis)

Abstract

In this paper, we report experimental evidence on the effectiveness of several techniques of persuasion commonly utilized in direct-mail solicitation. The study is built on theory-based, descriptive models of fundraising discourse and on comparisons of recommended and actual practices related to three dimensions of persuasion: rhetorical, visual, and linguistic. The specific rhetorical variable included is persuasive appeal (rational, credibility, or affective). The visual variable selected for the study is the presence or absence of bulleted lists, and the linguistic variable included is readability, or the complexity of exposition. Subjects were presented with pairs of fictive direct-mail appeals from imaginary universities that differ in these dimensions and asked to allocate a hypothetical $100 across each pair. Results suggest that letters utilizing credibility appeals and letters written at a high level of readability produce the highest donations.

Suggested Citation

  • Elizabeth Goering & Ulla Connor & Ed Nagelhout & Richard Steinberg, 2008. "Persuasion in Fundraising Letters: An Interdisciplinary Study," Working Papers wp200804, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:iup:wpaper:wp200804
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.iupui.edu/~econ/workingpapers/wp200804.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Persuasion; Donations;

    JEL classification:

    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iup:wpaper:wp200804. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ye Zhang (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiupus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.