Storytelling and emotional engagement in "Social Communication": the Italian donation campaigns

The paper offers reflections on how non-profit and public sector organizations, in the network society, make communication campaigns aimed at sensitizing the population on socially relevant issues, such as health and well-being, using storytelling and communicative registers that arouse emotions in the publics, online and offline. The social communication has a function of symbolic integration in the society and can arouse different emotions: from a friendly, shameful or reassuring, even ironic communication in which the theme (or a problem) is represented in its positive sense, to a communication that leverages feelings of fear (fear arousing appeal), until the tendency to strike terror. In this framework, the paper illustrates a research, which aimed to analyze the communicative campaigns on the "donation" which have been conducted in Italy over the last five years, to understand some trends and principal characteristics.