Charity Context Research Articles

Managing spillover: Response strategies to another Charity’s crisis

The prior research suggests that an organization’s crisis can damage publics’ evaluation of the industry, which is known as crisis spillover. To examine the crisis spillover and differential effects of the response strategies in the charitable sector, the study conducted a web-based experiment with a mixed-subjects design of 3 response strategies (bolstering vs. denial vs. differentiation) × 2 charity types (local vs. global) × 3 time periods (pre-crisis vs. post-crisis vs. post-response). The results confirm crisis spillover in the charity context and suggest that an innocent organization’s response can mitigate the effects of crisis spillover on the entire charitable sector. Furthermore, the study found that bolstering and denial strategies were more effective in improving public attitudes, trust, and donation intentions toward the responded charity compared to the differentiation strategy. These effects were not moderated by charity types. These findings provide insights into effective response strategies to mitigate crisis spillover in a charity context.

Charity ugliness premium: Donors' empathy for unattractiveness during the COVID‐19 pandemic and implications for charity advertising

AbstractMarketers and policymakers use advertising visuals to motivate prosocial behavior, whereby visual attractiveness influences people's empathy and thus their prosocial decisions. In the charity context, various donor‐related factors, including external circumstances and environments in which donors find themselves, can determine the impact of visual attractiveness. In two studies, this research investigates how and why donors responded to attractive/unattractive charitable images during the universal hardship of the COVID‐19 pandemic. In the first study, field data from a charity platform reveal how visual aesthetics affected donations before and during the pandemic. In the second study, a laboratory experiment examines empathy as a mediator of the relationship between visual attractiveness and charitable purchase intentions before and during the pandemic. During the pandemic, unattractive visuals generated significantly greater empathy than attractive visuals, and empathy drove donations and purchase intentions for charitable goods. That is, the “ugliness premium” dominated the “beauty premium” during the pandemic. Our findings that natural disasters or crises moderate observers' preferences for visual attractiveness or unattractiveness offer meaningful insights for applying visual aesthetics to charity advertising designs.

Mind the gap: Understanding the gap between intentions and behaviour in the charity context

Intention measures are used as a proxy for future behaviour. Although there is often a gap between intentions and subsequent behaviour, little is known about why the intention-behaviour gap (IB-gap) occurs. This longitudinal study across Australia, New Zealand and China quantifies the IB-gap in the context of donating money, goods, and time to charities. The factors underpinning the IB-gap are documented (i.e., why intenders don’t act and non-intenders do), resulting in the development of a framework summarising 12 key reasons. Findings show that intenders don’t follow through due to perceived time/effort constraints or lack of resources. Non-intenders subsequently give due to heightened awareness and attitudes about a charity/cause, or an intrinsic motivation such as empathy. Our findings allow researchers and marketers to better understand and interpret intention metrics, with guidance on how to minimise barriers to action across three types of support behaviours.

Música, lectura y bordado: la fuerza social de la máquina de coser de la Compañía Singer y la Escuela de Obreras Católicas (1875-1930)

The opinions expressed in the press regarding education in this period have two directions: on the one hand, they criticize the scarcity and poor material conditions of schools, and on the other hand, they try to create an awareness that serves to transmit their own ideology but what about non-formal education? Parallel to this educational universe, non-regulated education is developed, outside legal limits and promoted by the most humanistic social agents within the context of charity. This article aims to show some practices of this teaching, such as music academies, popular libraries, night and Sunday schools for Catholic workers in the city of Elche and the Singer Company, under the gaze of historical sociology.

Corporate brand management in a charity context: the internal communications challenge

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to investigate the practical issues and challenges faced when managing a corporate brand internally within a charity context from perspectives of both senior managers and grassroots volunteers.Design/methodology/approachAn interpretive exploratory approach was adopted, where emphasis was placed on giving voice to participants considered as knowledge agents. Data collection methods included a combination of interviews and participatory observation. In-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with seven volunteers (including five branch chairs and one trustee) and five senior managers (chief executive officer [CEO], head of fundraising, national and regional directors and head of information and helplines). Participatory observations included visits in five branches as well as participation in two volunteer-targeted events.FindingsFindings from this study revealed the complexities of managing a charity brand internally with several issues and challenges relating to internal communications. Also, three major themes emerged from insights gathered from both senior managers and volunteers, which are as follows: (1) internal brand clarity, (2) internal relational communications and (3) internal brand presence.Originality/valueThe key contribution of the paper lies in exploring the challenges of managing a corporate brand internally from both the perspectives of senior management and volunteers within a unique charity context. The study adds insights on the issues and tension faced by charities in managing their brands internally and provides a series of practical recommendations that might help charities in strengthening their brands from inside.

Diffusion of Being Pivotal and Immoral Outcomes

Abstract We study how the diffusion of being pivotal affects immoral outcomes. In our main experiment, subjects decide about agreeing to kill mice and receiving money versus objecting to the killing and foregoing the monetary amount. In a baseline condition, subjects decide individually about the life of one mouse. In the main treatment, subjects are organized into groups of eight and decide simultaneously. Eight mice are killed if at least one subject opts for killing. The fraction of subjects agreeing to kill is significantly higher in the main condition compared with the baseline condition. In a second experiment, we run the same baseline and main conditions but use a charity context and additionally study sequential decision-making. We replicate our finding from the mouse paradigm. We further show that the observed effects increase with experience, i.e., when we repeat the experiment for a second time. For both experiments, we elicit beliefs about being pivotal, which we validate in a treatment with non-involved observers. We show that beliefs are a main driver of our results.

Save the planet or close your eyes? Testing strategic ignorance in a charity context

Do people try to avoid unpleasant information about the environmental consequences of their actions? If so, do they react with hostility towards others who provide the unwanted information? Fearing such hostility, do others abstain from providing the information? These are the questions we set out to explore by means of lab experiments presented here. To our surprise, and in stark contrast to related previous literature, we found few indications of willful ignorance. In a binary dictator game with an environmental charity as the recipient, an option to stay uninformed about the effects of one's actions for the charity was infrequently chosen, and did not significantly affect generosity. When another subject might choose to impose information on the dictator, almost all dictators asked for information themselves – but this was not associated with increased dictator generosity. We argue that the phenomenon of strategic ignorance is likely to be less robust and more context-dependent than one might expect based on previous research, and that this result may be important from an environmental policy perspective.

The Champion Effect in Peer-to-Peer Giving: Successful Campaigns Highlight Fundraisers More Than Causes

Online peer-to-peer giving is an emerging charity context that has rarely been investigated. Using a unique combination of survey and behavioral data from 1,647 online peer-to-peer fundraisers (whom we call “champions”), we tested empirically the influence of different best practices on fundraising success in this novel giving context. Across two samples, we found the fundraiser’s identification with the cause led them to engage in more best practice actions, which in turn led to greater fundraising success. However, not all actions were equally influential. Actions that made the champion salient—namely those relating to solicitation and those that signaled the fundraiser was highly invested in their campaign—were the strongest predictors of fundraising success, together explaining 28 times the variance accounted for by actions signaling charity efficacy. Thus, fundraisers will have more success by championing themselves than by promoting the charity in question: a finding with important applied and theoretical implications.

Legal limits on political campaigning by charities: drawing the line

The fear for charities of being on the wrong side of the law when it comes to campaigning has always been strong. Recent UK legislation on political campaigning has caused considerable consternation, bringing some difficult issues to the fore. This paper reviews recent evidence on legislation, referring to previous regulatory experience to put new developments in a clear context of charity and electoral law. It highlights ambiguities and suggests how further regulatory guidance might help.

The social value of productive entrepreneurship

As a critical contribution to the social entrepreneurship literature, this paper first engages the concept of social entrepreneurship. Situating it within the distinctive context of charity and philanthropy, it provides structure and clarity. Next, it identifies related sources of social impact and value creation, positing social and economic value creation as potentially overlapping. It then provides comparative case studies focusing on Microsoft Corporation and Grameen Bank, to illustrate these issues relative to productive and social entrepreneurship. Recognized as highly successful innovative ventures, these two enterprises have had profound social impact on the world, even if that impact is derived from very different perspectives and motivations.

Charities and Lobbying: Institutional Rights in the Wake ofCitizens United

Abstract The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC provided corporations with the highest level of First Amendment speech protection, at least in the context of election-related speech. On its face, this strong level of protection would seem to throw into doubt the speech-related restrictions federal tax law imposes on charities, including the limits on lobbying. There are, however, at least two reasons to believe this conclusion is incorrect. First, the effect of the Citizens United holding on the lobbying limits for charities is unclear because of the Supreme Court's identification of a government subsidy—in the form of tax benefits—in the charity context. Second, the Court's related decision to conclude that a charity's First Amendment rights are sufficiently vindicated by the ability to speak through the alternate channel of a non-charitable affiliate further complicates the analysis. At the same time, however, these complications provide grounds for considering whether a more nu...

An investigation into the values dimensions of branding: implications for the charity sector

Abstract Branding is being adopted by charities and written about in academic and practitioner charity literature with increasing frequency. There is also growing concern, however, about the over‐commercialistion of the sector and the misappropriation of techniques developed specifically for the commercial environment. Literature supporting the claim that charities are values‐based organisations is reviewed and the proposition is made that it is in fact the non‐negotiability of charity values that differentiate them from commercial organisations. Given the significance of values in the charity sector, the paper argues that a clearer understanding of how values are conceptualised in branding is necessary in order to establish whether branding is an appropriate and effective tool in the charity context. To achieve this, the paper reviews relevant branding literature focusing in particular upon the delineation of the values dimensions identified in for‐profit branding models. To aid further understanding of these values dimensions in the non‐profit context and their applicability (or otherwise) to it, the metaphors of brand as ‘mirror’, ‘lamp’ and ‘lens’ are introduced. It is argued that in the corporate sector the brand concept has been utilised to ‘mirror’ those values that underpin the needs and desires of consumers. In contrast to the passive mirror, when operationalised as ‘lamp’, it is claimed that the brand aims to influence both the values of the organisation and the values of its target audience. It is postulated that neither of these approaches is appropriate for values‐led organisations and that it is only as a metaphorical ‘lens’, projecting the values of the organisation itself that branding offers an applicable and effective model in the charity context. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A qualification concerning the efficiency of tax expenditures

This paper examines a problem in a welfare loss model of tax expenditures. This problem forces us to reconsider the normative efficiency argument for tax expenditures. A reformulation highlights an implicit assumption of improper government allocation contained in the original model. The reformulation suggests that subsidization is an inappropriate marginal policy tool in the charity context.