Philanthropic Direct Mail in an English/Italian Perspective: A Corpus-Based Study

This article illustrates the generic move structure of Italian philanthropic fundraising letters as compared to their US American counterpart described by Upton (2002). The purpose is to highlight similarities and differences in an intercultural perspective, and show the main ways in which nonprofit organizations in Italy and the United States structure and use written texts to persuade their donors to give. For his study of fundraising letters as a genre, Upton (2002) used the ICIC Fundraising Corpus, a large electronic corpus of philanthropic texts which has been built and widely described by ICIC scholars (e.g. Upton & Connor 2001; Upton 2002; Connor & Gladkov 2004). For the purposes of the present study, an Italian corpus of Italian direct mail letters was built, with a view to comparing the Italian generic discourse features of philanthropy with the American ones as they emerge from an analysis of the ICIC Fundraising Corpus.