Current Issue Summary
March 2024 (Vol. 64, Issue 1)
How Charitable Appeals Shape Donors’ Donation Choices — Giving Food or Books: Nuances in Donors’ Responses to Positive versus Negative Appeals
In the desire to help others, will a person give a fish, or teach a person how to fish? This work by Jihao Hu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Tongmao Li (University of Florida), and Zhimin Zhou (Shenzhen University) compares the effects of positive and negative appeals on donors’ choices. Across four studies, donors viewing charitable advertisements with positive appeals preferred autonomy-oriented helping approaches (e.g., giving money to build a school in poor rural areas) over dependency-oriented helping approaches (e.g. donating food). The authors attribute their results to an expanded cognitive scope that was consistent with people’s long-term helping preferences. Moreover, donation motivations played a moderating role, underscoring the need to make appropriate adjustments in the advertising appeal based on specific donor motives.
Among the takeaways:
- “Positive appeals by charitable organizations could be used to boost long-term assistance and self-sufficiency (i.e., donating books) to broaden the benefits for multiple recipients.
- “Such appeal types may need to be adjusted when different donation motives are in play to increase the efficacy of the related initiatives.
- “The focal effect of a charitable appeal is salient when the donors’ motives signal commitment; therefore, positive appeals should be combined with supplementary communications (e.g., slogans, cover stories) that speak directly to this motive.
- “Governments and policymakers should strategically consider their charitable advertisements that expand the donors’ cognitive scope to elicit their autonomy-oriented helping actions and improve recipients’ long-term welfare.”