<p>The effectiveness of emotional appeals in charitable fundraising campaigns is well established, yet the specific linguistic cues that elicit core prosocial emotions—empathy, urgency, and solidarity—remain underexplored. This study investigates how such cues are strategically deployed and how their use relates to campaign success. Drawing on narrative transportation theory, we conduct a corpus-based analysis of 982 English-language GoFundMe campaigns launched after October 7, 2023, related to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, focusing on BERT-based emotion detection, keyword density measures, and pronoun use. Results from emotion detection indicate that negative emotions such as grief, fear, and remorse stimulate empathy and urgency, drawing donors into beneficiaries’ lived experiences and prompting immediate action. At the same time, positive emotions such as pride, hope, and optimism strengthen solidarity by framing giving as a shared responsibility and collective endeavor. Keyword analysis revealed that vague or overused terms (e.g., help, immediate) appeared disproportionately in unsuccessful campaigns, whereas more concrete urgency terms (e.g., <i>emergency</i>) were strongly associated with success. Pronoun analysis further showed that although first-person references dominate campaign texts, their relative distribution did not differentiate outcomes. Taken together, the findings highlight both the power and the limits of language in humanitarian crowdfunding. For scholars, the study advances research on language, persuasion, and narrative transportation in crowdfunding contexts. For practitioners, it offers actionable strategies for crafting impactful and emotionally resonant campaign narratives that effectively evoke empathy, convey urgency, and foster solidarity.</p>