The Heart Versus the Head: How Nonprofit Use of Emotion and Cognition Attracts Donors and Volunteers

How do nonprofits use language to attract donors and volunteers? We investigate how nonprofits attract these resources by framing emotion and cognition in descriptions of their activities to make them optimally distinctive compared to their peers. We employ computational text analysis to measure the emotional and cognitive/rational valences of nonprofit mission statements in new administrative IRS 990 e-filer data. We then embed nonprofits in their fields—for example, arts, education, or social welfare—to assess whether organizations gain more support if they amplify the cognitive and emotional valences in their field, or whether standing out among competitors by contrasting (using an unusual combination of emotion and cognition for a field) yields more donations and volunteers. We find that nonprofits who amplify emotional messages attract both donors and volunteers, that amplification of cognitively oriented valences can discourage volunteering, and that contrasting strategies are generally ineffective or discourage attention to nonprofits.