When it comes to certain causes of public interest, organisations may be tempted to appeal to the public’s compassion. But things aren’t that simple. Compassion can be a powerful tool, if used wisely.
Associations and NGOs have evolved rapidly in recent years, increasingly occupying the digital world in an attempt to convince citizens and firms of the importance of their actions and the need to receive donations.
In France, for example, for the approximately €9 billion donated each year, the share of digital technology in the collection of donations reached more than a third of the total, thanks to years of continuous growth, including +50% between 2019 and 2024.
As a result, traditional collection channels—paper mailings, street marketing, etc.—are now almost always supplemented by online tools, particularly on social media. Every day, we are all confronted with messages asking for a little of our attention and compassion: images of suffering children, displaced families, or wounded animals have become a staple of social advertising.
These campaigns aim to elicit compassion: a moral emotion that makes others’ suffering feel urgent and unacceptable. Yet compassion-based advertising often delivers mixed results. Sometimes it mobilises action; other times it leads to fatigue, avoidance, or shallow engagement.
In our latest academic article, we compared dozens of research that took a close look at online campaigns. The goal was to identify what works and what deters donors. Our work suggests that the answer lies not simply in how much compassion is evoked, but in the kind of action that compassion is being asked to support. Here is how and why, and what we recommend changing in certain campaigns to enable them to achieve their objectives.
Compassion is powerful, but limited
Compassion is especially effective at motivating what social psychologists call “helping prosocial behaviour”: actions that provide immediate relief to suffering. This includes donating money, sponsoring a child, or giving emergency aid.
Appeals by organisations such as Save the Children, UNICEF, or UNHCR are archetypal examples. Their campaigns often feature identifiable victims and vivid depictions of hardship, paired with a clear call to donate. Compassion works well here because the action matches the emotion’s core motivation: alleviating suffering now.
For instance, UNHCR’s refugee appeals typically highlight families fleeing conflict and ask viewers to “help provide shelter, food, and safety today.” The emotional logic is consistent: feeling compassion would encourage us to help victims in order to reduce their suffering.
Why compassion struggles to drive systemic change
Problems arise when compassion appeals are used to promote what we call “transformative prosocial behaviour”. This concept gathers the actions which aimed at changing the structural causes of suffering, such as laws, policies, or corporate practices. Supporting asylum reform, signing petitions against human rights violations, or mobilising political pressure requires sustained commitment and a sense of responsibility, not just care.
Here, compassion alone is often insufficient. Feeling for victims does not necessarily translate into challenging governments, confronting powerful actors, or accepting personal costs. This helps explain why compassion-heavy campaigns sometimes fail to mobilise political engagement, even when they successfully move audiences emotionally.
Organisations like Amnesty International or Greenpeace usually request transformative action in their campaigns, inviting people to act against wrongdoing by signing petitions, contacting authorities, or supporting legal reforms.
They also activate compassion: Amnesty’s campaigns depict victims of torture, political repression, or unlawful detention and Greenpeace animals being trapped, killed, or suffering as a result of ecosystem destruction.
In this case, mobilising compassion alone does not and will not work: it is necessary to foreground injustice, accountability, and responsibility. In other words, unless compassion is blended with moral anger or guilt their campaigns appeals do not motivate transformative action. Compassion signals that suffering matters; anger identifies injustice and blame; guilt highlights personal or collective responsibility. Together, these emotions are better suited to motivating transformative action.
When compassion backfires, and how to improve social advertising
There is another risk. Compassion appeals often co-activate distress. If suffering is portrayed as overwhelming and audiences feel powerless to make a difference, they may disengage to protect themselves emotionally. This helps explain compassion fatigue and why ever more shocking imagery does not necessarily lead to more action.
Effective campaigns therefore operate within two boundaries: they must activate enough compassion to motivate concern, but not so much distress that people withdraw.
The takeaway is not that compassion is ineffective, but that it must be matched to the right goal. Compassion works best for benevolent actions that relieve suffering directly. When the aim is social or institutional change, compassion needs to be combined with emotions that activate responsibility, agency, and justice.
Understanding this distinction and using the toolkit depicted above can help NGOs, activists, and policymakers design campaigns that do more than move people emotionally: they can move them to change the world.
Photo by Tolu Akinyemi via Unsplash
