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📍What we're talking about this issue: 
 The emotion of Awe, and how you can evoke it for more 
effective, inspiring nonprofit storyteling  

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Dear defender of good,

“An overwhelming sense of connectedness. An explosion of awareness. An epiphany.”* 

What if your fundraising and donor communications could spark that kind of response and emotion in your supporters?

Meet Awe, the greatest fundraising emotion you might not be using...

*Not my words: Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell used them to describe how seeing the earth from space felt, now called the overview effect. (Read on for more) 

A Fundraiser’s Primer on Awe:
The greatest emotion you might not be using 

✍️ By Lisa Sargent
Fundraising copywriter

Loyalty Letter #6: August 2024

As a fundraiser you’ve probably read lots by now about the extraordinary effects of evoking core emotions like love, compassion, and gratitude in your donors – and the lasting, meaningful relationships those emotions can help you build. 

But you probably haven’t heard much about the powerhouse emotion that is Awe. 

The study of awe – aweology? ;)– is practically a baby in the research world. 

 

Scientists once thought the only way to experience awe’s transcendent feeling was from space: those Apollo 14 astronauts, in other words, were alone among us. 

Lucky for us, since the first research papers on awe’s neuroscience started coming out around twenty years ago, scientists have learned that’s not the case.  (For the record: other cultures have been talking about awe for ages. One example in the postscript at end of this newsletter.)

Already, Awe has been shown to:

• Inspire generosity
• Move people to act
• Deepen meaning in their lives
• Reduce stress and improve pain
• Change how we perceive time
• Make people feel more connected and part of something bigger than themselves
• Help them make more ethical decisions, and
• See beyond their own needs and desires

Can you imagine? 

ONE emotion can do all that – and you don’t need to see Earth from space to evoke it! 

That’s why... based on all that Awe can help us do (and feel) in our own fundraising and philanthropy work – and all that Awe can help supporters, staff, and volunteers feel, do, and be in their lives, through giving and beyond... I’m not waiting to invoke Awe in my nonprofit storytelling. 

I hope you won’t wait, either. 

Starting with these proven ways to 
put Awe to work in your own 
fundraising and donor communications...

(1) You can incorporate vastness and spark Awe via the Small Self.

I write a lot about telling the Story of One. One beneficiary. One legacy giver. One. 

So when I say incorporate vastness, I don’t mean start sprinkling big numbers into your fundraising copy like confetti. 

And I don’t mean phrases like “saving countless millions.”

I’m talking here about the Small Self. 

That view from space, that leaves us knowing we are infinitesimal and part of something so much larger at the same time.

Or being in nature, on a mountain’s overlook.  Or on a cold winter night, beneath a forever blanket of stars.

It turns out experiences that help us understand how small we are in the grand scheme promote what’s called moral expansiveness. 

We even draw or show ourselves as smaller in relation to other things (as referenced in my own stick-figure ;) diagram at the start of this section). 

We also feel more connected to humanity. We want to help. (And we shift to words like “we” vs “me” in describing it, a commonality. Lovely.)

To spark the small self, you can use a photo with a big backdrop...

Here you meet the amazing Abdella, and get the sense of what we describe in an appeal (not shown here):

Abdella is walking hours into the mountains every day, to bring water back to his little nephews and his village, and in even the small thumbnail photo we selected as part of this direct mail insert, you get the sense of vastness through his journey ahead. 

This, together with the copy and the rest of the pack itself, can help evoke Awe. At his journey, in supporters' ability to help, all of it. 

(2) You can describe vastness and spark Awe in your words.

This one’s speedy.

You can call on nature in your fundraising stories, in the same way you experience awe through a video or photo of an expansive scene.

For example:
As a golden sun paints the treetops, a bell brightly chimes. The world is waking up...
 

You can frame the perspective with the juxtaposition of little and large:

For example:
What, you might wonder, does one tiny, forgotten kitten matter in a big, wide world? You know: Everything. 

You can say name the action and expansiveness outright:

For example:

When you give from the heart, something special comes back to you in return. Something meaningful. Something beautiful. We are not alone. 

(3) You can bring vastness into a timeline. 

This one’s very cool, and not mine: it’s Jen Shang’s.

Together with her team of gratitude researchers, Jen found if you’re telling a highly emotional story, “additional information on vastness can serve to enhance donor well-being.” 

Extending the timeline is one way to accomplish that. 
 

From her research, she gives examples of phrases like, “This year, we did not have to turn away a single patient.” 

Or “In the coming year, we do not want a single person like Juliana to feel let down.” 

 

And so forth. Extending the timeline helps you incorporate vastness.

(Note: There’s more Jen and her team of researchers found. And if you don’t have Learning to Say Thank You yet, you need it. Free on sign up at the eternally extraordinary Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy.)

(4) You can spark Awe by reframing the narrative.

For me as a nonprofit story strategist, fundraising writing and donor communications are all about the epic. 

Science supports me. Vastness of action – a.k.a., the heroic, the epic – can also evoke Awe. 

Picture, for example, the story of the doctor who worked 48 hours straight to save a patient’s life. 

In the case of Designer Sandie and me, we put that physician's true story on a lift note in a fundraising appeal. Like this:

How much more willing would you be to give to help a healthcare foundation like that? 

As it turns out, lots: when we invoke Awe through the telling of heroic stories, we help people put aside their day-to-day worries and fears. We motivate them to act, to give, to help. 

(4) You can even get tiny to spark Awe. 

We started out vast. Now we get tiny.

A blade of grass... a single drop of cholera-free water... a baby’s cry.  A breath. A hand. A heartbeat.

For one hospital foundation, we discovered that every time a newborn baby is born, a lullaby chimes over the hospital-wide intercom – and in a holiday appeal, we connected that to the little miracle of a baby who needed weeks in intensive care to survive, and the promise of the future.

At another organization, we shared the story of staff seeing a client’s jeans frozen to his skin. Without saying a word, they found a pair of scissors and knelt at this man’s feet to help. 

Awe scientists tell us that the heroic and vast is found in the tiny, too...

... So remember to think small as well as grand when you connect those threads in your copywriting and in your imagery.

Of course, these Awe-Inspirers only scratch the surface. 

As the neuroscience behind one of the greatest emotions is unpacked, I have no idea what wonders will unfold.

But for me, and I hope for you, that’s what makes fundraising copywriting and nonprofit storytelling so beautiful... my own Awe-Inspirer: that by learning together here, we can help add more meaning to our donors’ lives, and help make the world better too.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Thanks for being a reader. In our own wonderful way, through the Loyalty Letter, we’re growing good together. 

I’m so glad you’re here, on this beautiful blue marble in space. ❤️

See you in two weeks! Write with great heart, 

PS. More about the Small Self and how people across time have understood awe, well before the astronauts. A quote from Black Elk, from Frontiers In Psychology:
“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all... [and] I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle.” 

PPS. For more on the overview effect -- from the very start of this newsletter, see Wikipedia's post here. 

P3S :) Want the full Loyalty Letter newsletter hub? Courtesy of the greatest-ever newsletter hosts, AWeber: https://lisasargent.optin.com/newsletter/awlist6658373 

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