Persuasion in Fundraising Letters: An Interdisciplinary Study

In this article, 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. Participants were presented with pairs of fictive direct-mail appeals from imaginary universities that differ in these dimensions and asked to allocate a hypothetical US100 across each pair. Results suggest that letters utilizing credibility appeals and letters written at a high level of readability produce the highest donations.