Abstract
Online advertising is an important tool that can be utilized by charities to elicit attention and funding. A critical examination of advertisement strategies is thus necessary to increase the efficacy of fundraising efforts. Previous studies have shown that individuals’ moral views and perceptions of social norms can play important roles in charitable behavior. Thus, the current protocol describes a study to examine whether framing charitable advertisements in line with participants’ morality and increasing the salience of descriptive social norms increases subsequent charitable behavior. We describe experimental, online methods, whereby participants are provided with a framed call-to-action and normative information within a custom-developed application or existing survey platform. Furthermore, in the exploratory fashion, we discuss the possibility of collecting participants’ Facebook data and predicting moral profiles from this data. If there is an increased rate of donations as a result of moral compatibility and/or increased norm salience, charities can leverage this knowledge to increase the donations by tailoring their campaigns in a more appealing way for their prospective donors. Moreover, if it turns out to be possible to predict one’s moral profile from Facebook footprints, charities can use this knowledge to find and target people that are more likely to support their cause. However, this introduces important ethical questions that are discussed within this protocol.
Highlights
Charities often provide a vital service for marginalized and vulnerable people in society
In line with the assumptions of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1985, 1991), we expect that the effects of calls-to-action congruence on charitable behavior (CB) will be mediated by attitudes toward CB, and that the effect of normative information on CB will be mediated by the perception of descriptive social norms
In line with previous research (e.g., Winterich et al, 2012; Kidwell et al, 2013; Nilsson et al, 2016), we expect that our intervention in terms of morallycongruent calls-to-action will have a significant impact on CB
Summary
Charities often provide a vital service for marginalized and vulnerable people in society. Several studies showed that moral and injunctive norms significantly predicted charitable intentions, after controlling for attitudes, perceived behavioral control and past behavior (Smith and McSweeney, 2007; van der Linden, 2011) In these studies, descriptive norms did not have a significant influence on charitable giving. In line with the assumptions of TPB (Ajzen, 1985, 1991), we expect that the effects of calls-to-action congruence on CB will be mediated by attitudes toward CB, and that the effect of normative information on CB will be mediated by the perception of descriptive social norms This part of the research would be purely exploratory, we expect to be able to predict some of the participants’ moral foundations by his/her Facebook behavior.
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