In this guide, we’ll explore how your nonprofit can touch the hearts and minds of current and future supporters with EQ-based marketing materials.

What is EQ?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. People with a high EQ are empathetic, compassionate, and communicative, allowing them to create resonant marketing content that mobilizes support for your cause.

Why is EQ important to nonprofit marketing?

Nonprofit marketing is all about stirring emotion in your audience. You have to make your audience understand how important your cause is by illustrating the impact it has on:

• Real beneficiaries
• Donors
• Volunteers
• The wider community
• Staff
• Future generations

To conduct a truly transformative and resonant marketing campaign, you must learn what emotionally motivates your target audience, create a compelling narrative, and build on the story over time. Whether you're writing a fundraising appeal letter, social media post with a strong call-to-action, or creating a video intended to mobilize your supporters to advocate on your behalf, building a strong EQ is essential to making these efforts worth it in the short and long run.

How do emotionally-intelligent marketers operate?

Nonprofit marketers need a solid understanding of their target audience’s and their beneficiaries’ emotions in order to appeal to them with marketing materials, but that’s just the beginning of what EQ can help them achieve. Emotionally-intelligent nonprofit marketers excel by:

• Conducting deep audience research. Stepping into your audience’s shoes is crucial for shaping the most impactful and informed marketing materials. Fifty and Fifty suggests organizing target audience data into personas, which are hypothetical audience profiles with demographic and psychographic information.
• Telling stories. Structuring your marketing campaigns around people-first narratives is crucial for creating impactful marketing messages. Emotionally-intelligent marketers interview beneficiaries and remain true to their wishes (this includes getting permission to feature them in marketing campaigns or simply sharing their stories in an authentic way).
• Using a consistent, genuine tone. Whether you’re using fundraising emails, direct mail, or social media to get the word out about your cause, keep a consistent tone so your audience can easily recognize your brand and you can accurately represent your beneficiaries.
• Leveraging attention-grabbing visuals and audio. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a video worth? Using both of these assets to your advantage can add dimension, emotion, and realism to your stories, allowing the audience to connect more deeply with beneficiaries.

To apply these strategies to your current marketing approach, start by incorporating more client testimonials and case studies on your website that center beneficiaries in your organization’s narrative.

How can nonprofits measure the impact of EQ in marketing?

Like any nonprofit initiative, you need to collect marketing data in order to confirm your efforts are paying off. However, it can be challenging to quantify emotional connection to your cause. Here are some tips for assessing how EQ impacts your campaigns:

• Track qualitative data. Since emotions are complex and vary from person to person, collect more nuanced insights by gathering qualitative data. Send surveys and conduct interviews to gauge how your audience reacted to the campaign. Then, create a word cloud or thought tree to understand your strengths and areas for improvement.
• Conduct A/B testing. On the quantitative side, you could track which strategies best tap into your audience’s emotions by creating two different campaigns that each use a single, distinct strategy or element. Then, track engagement rates so you can understand your most effective tactics.

In order for this data to be useful, you’ll need to collect it consistently. Devise a schedule or cadence for gathering this data, whether it’s after you wrap up a major campaign or at a specific time benchmark (quarterly or biannually).

What does emotionally-intelligent marketing look like in practice?

Let’s wrap up by taking a look at real nonprofit marketing resources that showcase a mastery of integrating EQ. This is the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB)’s donation page, which acts as a marketing tool to persuade visitors to follow through with their gift.

Here are some important strategies to note:

• Statistics. While data can feel cut-and-dry, you can use it to give an emotional story more depth. By mentioning the fact that one in ten people in metro Atlanta don’t have enough to eat and that a $100 gift will provide 300 meals, ACFB makes it easy for donors to understand who their generosity will benefit, helping them connect emotionally with beneficiaries.
• Picture of a beneficiary. Highlighting a real beneficiary (especially a smiling child) promotes a sense of hope and makes your cause feel more real.
• Centering of beneficiaries. Instead of simply asking for a contribution, the donation page’s title reads “Help Our Neighbors Facing Hunger.” This call to action allows the audience to feel a communal bond with beneficiaries, even if they’ve never met, and highlights them as the most important part of ACFB’s activities.

Ultimately, emotionally-intelligent marketers understand that donor relationships are partnerships, and by using donor-centric language, they empower donors to stay involved.