Pronouns, Positioning, and Persuasion in Top Nonprofits’ Donor Appeals

Abstract

Despite increased giving in 2019, competition for donations among nonprofits remains high, especially when a charitable organization’s niche overlaps with that of others’. Consequently, nonprofit charitable organizations must tell stories that persuade donors to support their mission and contribute. This study uses positioning theory to examine how websites of the charitable organizations that appeared in Forbes Magazine’s 2019 top 100 charities use storytelling to facilitate their ethos such that they gain support and thus increase their donor base. The results revealed that nonprofits use positioning to establish two types of partnerships: invited and assumed. Furthermore, the coding revealed three primary types of positioning within these partnerships: savior-follower, business partners, and teacher-student. These positions organize and set the parameters for each organization’s story and will not only influence and potentially dictate the speech acts that follow, but also the responsibilities and rights of all those involved.