A study of move analysis in American NPOs' online fundraising pages: a comparison between domestic and global campaigns in health operations

This comparative study attempted to (1) identify the rhetorical moves that occurred in the campaign descriptions of the domestic and global campaigns in health operations, and (2) compare the similarities and differences of rhetorical moves that occurred in campaign descriptions in the domestic and global campaigns in the health operations. The data was collected from www.globalgiving.org, a website by an American nonprofit that helps promote fundraising campaigns from organizations, both local and international. Every campaign description was written following the template of four sections: ‘Summary,’ ‘Challenge,’ ‘Solutions,’ and ‘Long-term impact,’ restricted by the website. Six moves and fifteen steps were found in the text analysis. ‘Providing solutions and/or potential benefits of the campaign’ was found to be the most common move in both domestic and global campaigns, while ‘Highlighting problems’ was the second most frequently used in the two corpora. The huge proportion of the texts these two moves occupied was enough to prove their significance as mandatory elements of the campaign descriptions. The analysis also found that ‘Providing solutions and/or potential benefits of the campaign’ was the most common in three sections of the format of the descriptions, i.e., ‘Summary,’ ‘Solution,’ and ‘Long-term Impact,’ while ‘Highlighting the Problems’ was the move preferred in the ‘Challenge’ section. This trend applied to both domestic and global campaigns. ‘Identifying Locations of the problem’ was much more emphasized in the global campaigns than the domestic campaigns, which was the only major contrast discovered in the study. As can be seen in the results, this move should always be a part of any global campaign, while it doesn’t matter as much in domestic campaigns. The author can decide if they wish to include this move or not. ‘Providing Organization’s/Campaign’s Information’ and ‘Persuading Donors’ were the less common options for the campaign writers, as they were occasionally included in the two corpora along with the major moves. ‘Giving Supporting Details’ was the only move that could be left out completely in both types of campaigns.