Under the trend of market liberalization, the aim of non-formal educational institutions such as community universities is not limited to meeting students’ needs, but entails creating learners’ profound experience and emotional enrichment during their learning process. In the current experience economy, achieving an affective (denoted as “touching” hereafter) emotional experience has been the highest priority in various areas, such as management, industrial design, and commercial design. Consequently, a technique called the evaluation grid method (EGM) was developed to systematically explore customers’ inner feelings and convert such feelings into service design elements. In this study, the EGM was used to investigate the “touching factors” of community universities. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 students who have attended community universities for more than 5 years to understand the factors that triggered their deep emotions and how they felt during their attendance of community universities. The results revealed that the touching factors of community universities included 7 heartfelt reasons, 17 specific actions, and 27 abstract feelings. The touching factors proposed in this study are a comprehensive notion integrated by cognitive reason, action, and emotional feelings. According to the presented findings, this study proposes recommendations for community universities and other educational institutions regarding how to create profound touching experiences for their students, thereby promoting educational service quality.