Hope vs. urgency: pick one

You’ve written this email before.

A deadline is in 48 hours, so you lead with urgency, then pivot to an inspiring story about what the gift will fund.

Turns out those two instincts might be working against each other.

Grow Progress just released its first Nonprofit Ads Benchmarks Report, testing 33 TV ads from 14 organizations as randomized controlled trials with roughly 31,000 respondents.

Yes, it’s about ads, not email. But the findings land on a question emailers deal with constantly: what should a message actually make someone feel?

Hope and urgency cancel each other out
This was the most interesting finding to me.

Ads designed around hope made viewers feel hopeful, but didn’t drive urgency to give. Ads designed around urgency to give did the reverse — they created time pressure but suppressed hopefulness.

Each tone actively worked against the other.

Think about what that means for your year-end sequence. That match-deadline email that also tries to be an inspiring impact story? You may be diluting both messages.

An email with one clear job probably works harder than one trying to do everything everywhere all at once.

Hope wins on almost everything except the immediate ask
Hope-toned ads outperformed urgency-toned ads on perceived impact (17.7% vs. 12%).

The one place urgency pulls ahead is donation intent — when the goal is to close a gift right now, urgency is the stronger driver. But for everything that happens between asks, hope does more.

That lines up with what good cultivation emails are supposed to do between asks: build trust and reinforce that a donation to your organization will actually matter.

The study found those same attributes — effectiveness, shared values, trustworthiness — were the strongest predictors of giving intent.

Your stewardship emails are quietly doing the work that makes the next appeal shine and convert.

Lapsed donors are harder to move than non-donors
People who had never donated showed stronger lifts in favorability (+10.5), trust (+7), and perceived impact (+11) than donors who lapsed over 12 months ago.

Lapsed donors trailed on every single measure, including donation intent.

If that pattern carries over to email, and I suspect it does, your reactivation series probably needs different creative, not just a different segment tag on the same appeal.

M+R and Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans found that one pre-campaign email inviting lapsed donors to reflect on why they first gave boosted response rates by 34%, which is exactly the kind of thinking this data supports.

How to apply these learnings to your program
Assign each email one job before you start writing. Is this send closing a gift or building the relationship?

Decide, then commit. The data says trying to split the difference weakens both.

Reserve urgency for direct asks and make sure it lands. Urgency was the strongest driver of donation intent in the study.

But two of the nine urgency-tagged ads performed no better than ads that weren’t even trying for urgency.

Writing “time is running out” doesn’t automatically make someone feel like time is running out.

If you’re leaning on urgency for a year-end appeal, test whether the creative is actually creating it.

The bottom line
Don’t agonize over whether you can fit urgency and inspiration into 300 words. You probably can’t, and shouldn’t — and that’s fine.

Give each email a single job and let it do that job well.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara