Negotiating solidarity with potential donors: a study of the images in fundraising letters by not-for-profit organizations

Abstract

Letters mailed by not-for-profit organizations in their fundraising campaigns derive their persuasive appeal from a complex interplay of verbal text, typographic features and images, combined in a visual design by means of layout. Drawing on an analysis of photographs from a corpus of fundraising letters and using the visual grammar developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), this study highlights the significant role played by images in orienting potential donors attitudinally towards the text that follows, thus contributing to the persuasive appeal of fundraising letters. More specifically, the study investigates how photographs might contribute to overcoming futility thinking from potential donors. The study also contributes to a richer account of the persuasive appeal of fundraising letters than is currently available in the fields of linguistics and psychology through an integrated methodology that draws on the fields of multimodal analysis and decision-making research.