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Have you ever considered using a small donation on product packaging to benefit your brand? Popular examples of this practice include, “buy a pack of toilet paper and the brand will donate 5 cents to the WWF” or “purchase a chocolate bar and 1.4 cents goes to UNICEF.” These promotional campaigns are known as Cause-Related Marketing Promotions (CMPs), which are designed to boost sales while supporting important causes of nonprofit organizations. Although these may seem small on the package, they are considerable investments for marketing managers. Beyond the donation, this promotion technique involves negotiation with the nonprofit organization as well as the redesign and reproduction of the packaging.

However, do CMPs actually drive sales, especially when they’re tucked away on a tiny part of the package? In addition, can they cut through the noise when consumers are faced with overwhelming product choices on grocery store shelves?

In a, authors Christina Schamp, Mark Heitmann, Yuri Peers, and Peter Leeflang investigate the potency of CMPs in driving short-term sales in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail settings. By analyzing eight years of data covering 63 CMP campaigns across 20 product categories, their study provides the first comprehensive field analysis of how CMPs impact sales in real-world retail environments. Below are the main findings:

CMPs Increase Sales on Average

On average, CMPs produce a 4.9% weekly sales increase while donating 3.2% of the product price. CMPs typically run for 11 weeks, creating sustained growth without the post-promotion dip seen in traditional price promotion (PP).

Who Should Use CMPs

The analysis reveals a large heterogeneity among different CMP campaigns. As CMPs might be overlooked at the point of sale, sales effects can double for categories where consumers notice the brand for factors other than the CMP itself:

• Category leaders
• Brands priced below category average
• Brands with fewer past price promotions
• Brands in simpler markets (fewer SKUs or less price dispersion)

When the setting does not suffice for a brand to enter the consumer’s consideration set, a simultaneously executed price promotion can boost the CMPs’ sales effects. Specifically, a 10% price reduction increases the CMPs’ sales lift by an average of 6.64% over and above the main effect of the PP itself.

How to Make Your Next CMP Campaign More Impactful

• For leading/low-priced brands: CMPs can work well on their own
• For non-leading/higher-priced brands: Combine with price promotions
• For all brands: time PPs and CMPs in parallel as opposed to subsequently

The logic behind this is simple: consumers can only respond to cause-related marketing that they actually notice. In crowded retail environments, shoppers quickly screen products using obvious cues, such as brand names and prices, so CMPs often go unnoticed unless the brand is already likely to be considered for other reasons. In other words, brands need to enter the consideration set to make CMPs work. CMPs do not drive the consideration set on their own.

“Brands need to enter the consideration set to make CMPs work. CMPs do not drive the consideration set on their own.”

We interviewed three of the authors to better understand the complex complementarity of CMPs and PPs and explore aspects of the research beyond what is reported in the article. Christina, Mark, and Yuri emphasized the role of price promotions in making CMPs a success in the FMCG sector, one of the largest and most diverse industries in terms of product categories, SKUs, and global turnover:

Q: What makes your research particularly valuable to both practitioners and researchers, and what surprising insights have emerged from it?

A: The main point of the paper is twofold. First, the average effect of CMPs is small, donations are modest, and sales gains are limited. Many brands do not repeat CMPs possibly because of insufficient economic returns. However, because these campaigns last longer than typical promotions, the total effect over time is not negligible. Other forms of promotion, such as price promotions, would experience diminishing effects over longer periods. Second, we found heterogeneity in CMP effects and studied why some cause-related marketing promotions work well while others do not. When you get it right, cause-related marketing has the potential of way higher effects than the average suggests.

Another special aspect of this study is that it tackles a phenomenon mainly studied in lab experiments, where the effects might appear larger than in the actual market. Rather than focusing on campaign design elements, it examines contextual factors such as pricing and competition—variables that are harder to test in lab settings but crucial for understanding what drives CMP success in the real world. With the actual data, we are able to study the actual economic returns of CMP.

Q: Typically, when brands run CMPs, they add to the marketing cost. Further adding PPs could end up hurting gains in the long run. Can brands boost their CMP performance with other marketing tactics, such as store positioning and in-store promotions?

A: We do not have data on marketing tactics, such as store positioning or in-store promotions, but our evidence suggests that improving product visibility and consumer consideration would theoretically enhance CMP effects. We find that price promotions are particularly effective in ensuring consumer consideration. At first sight, they might seem like a conceptual mismatch that appeals to egoistic consumer motives rather than the altruistic motives CMP relates to. However, consideration is critical to ensure that CMPs do not pass unnoticed limits. Combining these factors creates a synergistic benefit. Note that the additional CMP effect due to price promotions comes at the top of the regular price promotion effect. Importantly, we also do not observe post-promotional dips with CMPs; once customers buy because of cause-related marketing, their sales levels do not fall below regular sales. Since brands typically need to work with retailers to conduct price promotions while CMPs are fully under their control, we recommend better coordination and timing. If you are doing both promotions anyway, align them for maximum benefit, rather than running them separately.

Q: Based on market evidence, do you think brands should take care of maintaining a logical match—like toilet paper brands supporting forest projects—to make their CMPs perform better, sales-wise?

A: Empirically, fit as a moderator is difficult to objectively code in hindsight. For example, a German beer brand donated to rainforest conservation. While this might not seem to be a high fit, advertising and brand positioning might influence fit perceptions over time and suggest otherwise to consumers. A cause-related marketing meta-analysis (Schamp et al., 2023) found that fit is one of the most researched phenomena in lab settings; however, it has only a small effect on consumer response. In a preliminary analysis based on subjective coding of fit, we found similar small effects of fit but did not include them in the paper due to interpretational challenges. Conceptually and based on our findings, we would expect factors such as visibility, concurrent price promotions, and being a leading brand to play a more dominant role than fit, which individual consumers might perceive very differently. Also note that until now, there has not been much competition in terms of simultaneous CMP campaigns in one category in a given time, which might help to make fit considerations more salient.

From an NGO perspective, this could be good news. It might very well open up many more possible collaborations, such as the beer brand’s effort for rainforest conservation, that marketers might otherwise rule out due to concerns about a possible lack of fit. When negotiating with brands, we further recommend that NGOs focus on the duration of the campaign rather than just the donation amount. Since we see a constant weekly sales lift over the campaign period, focusing on campaign length creates a win-win for both brands and nonprofits.

Q: This study focuses on the FMCG sector, which has its own challenges. What kind of sales boost do you expect other product sectors to focus on CMPs such as apparel, cosmetics, and electronics?

A: One of the reasons we studied the FMCG sector was its one-of-a-kind nature. FMCG is roughly 14 trillion USD in global industry, marking about 10% of the global economy. This is important not only from an industry perspective but also from an NGO awareness perspective. Pretty much all of us go grocery shopping. Running the right collaboration with leading brands, brands with attractive price positions, or those willing to add price promotions has a good chance of reaching many people who might be interested in supporting charitable causes but due to different reasons might fail to do so otherwise.

While we lack data, we could try to draw some logical conclusions from our findings regarding other industries. For example, in electronics, Apple is a well-recognized brand; therefore, if they run a reasonable CMP, they would have a good chance of making a sizeable impact. Conversely, one of the many USB drive brands on Amazon risks smaller effects because CMPs do not attract consideration on their own. Therefore, in terms of generalization, we would not be able to differentiate industries but would think more about the actual shopping experiences and the complexity of consumers’ decision-making processes. Whenever consumers apply consideration-then-choice decision making, several factors such as the ones we observed should help CMPs boost sales and promote ethical consumerism. Of course, other factors not part of our investigation could play an additional role in other categories and would need to be considered in addition to these considerations.

Q: Some of the data are more than 10 years old, and consumer consumption has changed considerably since then in terms of increased digital retail and consumers’ rising awareness about societal issues. If this study were done today, what could be the possible differences in the results?

A: To investigate this, we controlled for time effects within our dataset and did not observe a strong shift in CMP effectiveness over time. Moreover, other ongoing projects have shown similar effect sizes. Regarding the role of consideration, we do not expect this to change over time. However, it is important to distinguish temporary cause-related marketing promotions specifically designed to boost short-term sales from brand positioning around ethical consumerism or corporate social responsibility (CSR). When any regular brand adds CMPs, consumers can only find them once they inspect these brands in more detail. However, ethically conscious consumers are often aware of sustainable brands and are likely to consider these without the need for additional price promotions or the necessity of being a market-leading brand. These brands may have profited from the rising awareness of societal issues. Note that very recently, the attention to CSR may have slowed somewhat, but as Forbes notes, “.” More brands are adopting these approaches and consumers are becoming more selective, requiring brands to be more informed about CSR execution and point-of-sale communications. A similar study of long-term CSR might shed further light on when and how to excite consumers with CSR.

Go to the Journal of Marketing Research

References

Kaplan, R. (2024), “Sustainability Isn’t in a Recession, It’s Graduating from High School,” Forbes (September 5).

Schamp, Christina, Mark Heitmann, Tammo H.A. Bijmolt, and Robin Katzenstein (2022), “,” Journal of Marketing Research, 60 (1), 189–215. doi:.

Schamp, Christina, Mark Heitmann, Yuri Peers, and Peter S.H. Leeflang (2024), “,” Journal of Marketing Research, 61 (5), 955–74. doi:.

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Traditional charities have historically used celebrity events, galas, public service announcements, and advertisements to solicit contributions. More recently, online crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and DonorsChoose have taken another route: By providing a direct connection with potential donors, they have eliminated the need for expensive marketing investments.

In a , we find that project stewards who contribute to their own campaigns within online crowdfunding platforms are significantly more likely to achieve funding success. This practice of self-donation serves as a powerful signaling tool. It highlights the project’s quality and importance, boosts the pace of donations, increases the total amount contributed, and enhances the overall likelihood of reaching funding goals. As nonprofits and educational causes increasingly rely on crowdfunding platforms, our research reveals how self-donation can effectively support these efforts.

Our team analyzed millions of donations on DonorsChoose, a well-known platform where teachers seek funds for classroom supplies, educational projects, and other instructional needs. We discovered that when teachers make visible self-donations to their projects, it strongly signals the project’s value and the teacher’s commitment. Our findings underscore that the effectiveness of self-donation is not solely about the amount contributed but also about the timing and visibility of these donations.

By investing their own money into their projects, teachers are more likely to attract additional support. This is particularly important for early-stage projects or for teachers who are new to the platform and have yet to build a reputation. A well-timed and visible self-donation at the start of a campaign can significantly increase the likelihood of reaching the funding goal. We also find that larger self-donations prove more effective in achieving fundraising goals. Further, projects involving a self-donation are more likely to send impact letters to donors to provide additional, yet indirect, evidence of the correlation between quality and self-donation.

Platforms should encourage project stewards to make visible self-donations as a means of improving the matching efficiency between donors and high-quality projects. This could involve highlighting self-donations on project landing pages or recommending projects based on the donor’s behavior. Such strategies could boost overall campaign success rates, benefiting both teachers and the students they serve.

A Viable Fundraising Strategy

The implications of our study extend to the broader educational community. School administrators and district leaders should encourage teachers to use self-donation as a fundraising strategy. In an era of tight school budgets, empowering teachers with effective fundraising tools can significantly enhance the quality of education that students receive. From the perspective of crowdfunding platforms like DonorsChoose, supporting and facilitating self-donation could improve the overall effectiveness of their services.

Our findings extend beyond the educational sector. The principle of self-donation can be applied in various contexts, including political campaigns and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. For instance, political candidates often contribute their own funds to signal their dedication, and companies publicly donate a portion of their profits to enhance their reputations. In each case, self-contribution acts as a powerful indicator of commitment and quality and tends to influence the behavior of others.

Platforms might develop features that make it easier for project stewards to make visible self-donations or to highlight these contributions to potential donors. Additionally, providing guidelines or best practices for teachers on strategically timing their self-donations could maximize impact.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

• The visibility of self-donations is crucial for fundraising. Individuals and organizations should be aware of the risks of anonymous self-donations.

• The frequency, recency, and amount of self-donations should be carefully planned to maximize their impact on fundraising success. Ideally, a single self-donation at the project’s outset can optimize its funding prospects.

• Platforms can highlight self-donations on the project landing page and encourage self-donations during the donation process to increase the project funding rate.

Our research offers valuable insights for teachers, crowdfunding platforms, and other stakeholders involved in online fundraising. By leveraging self-donation as a signaling mechanism, educators can increase their chances of successfully funding their projects, thus enhancing educational experiences for their students. Crowdfunding platforms can improve their services by supporting and promoting self-donation strategies. We encourage all stakeholders to incorporate these findings into their practices to create more successful and impactful fundraising campaigns.

The effects of self-donation may vary in more complex contexts where funds go directly to fundraisers and could raise moral concerns. We encourage scholars to extend our theory by examining the impact of self-donations in other contexts. Future research may also study the dynamic interactions among donors during the donation process.

Source: Zhuping Liu, Qiang Gao, and Raghunath Singh Rao, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Traditionally, volunteers were thought to be motivated by the altruistic act of giving, and many chose nonprofits due to a strong sociocultural fit and personal convictions. However, volunteers now interact differently with brands in the nonprofit sector. Individuals devote fewer hours to their causes and want flexible schedules. They seek opportunities for personal growth and pick activities with potential work-related benefits. These new volunteers often show a weaker sense of affiliation with organizations.

This raises an important question: How can organizations effectively cultivate relationships with volunteers whose interests and motivations are shifting?

A finds that entertaining more distant relationships can mutually benefit nonprofit organizations and volunteers. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of the Red Cross in Vienna, Austria, our research demonstrates that organizations can effectively manage both traditional and new types of volunteers by adopting tailored relationship management practices.

Relationship Growth for Traditional Volunteers

Nonprofit brands continue to need the vision, commitment, and initiative of traditional, growth-oriented volunteers who provide the backbone of organizational activities. To allow these relationships to thrive, managers should focus on a solid material presence.

Nonprofits should establish a physical infrastructure so that volunteers can gather, socialize, and bond. Managers should provide training and competence-building activities to assist the intensification of the brand relationship. They should supply branded clothing to facilitate easy visual identification of members and communicate with members by leveraging high quality content such as exclusive print magazines.

In addition, managers need to carefully create documentation that clearly presents the brand’s history and values as well as provide a comprehensive and clear description of what volunteering entails in terms of expectations and duties. Communicating a compelling narrative consistently throughout the volunteer’s journey is crucial to sustain the path of growth and intensification.

These brand relationship practices will enable volunteers to ascend, over time, to strategic roles within the organization, including mentoring and training of future generations of volunteers. These growth-oriented volunteers, when supported with the right managerial practices, progressively become practice champions and thus constitute valuable assets for the organization.

Activating New Volunteers

New volunteers seek flexibility and opportunity; they help out when they have time and when the task fits their agenda. Adopting a pragmatic approach to the relationship is crucial for nonprofit organizations. This involves accepting a certain degree of distance to and from these volunteers, who may be less emotionally attached to the organization, and respecting their desire for intermittent engagement. What matters is not their unwavering loyalty but their existing skills.

Consequently, the managerial focus needs to shift to acquiring and activating volunteers as needed. Organizations should initially build a diverse pool of volunteers whom they can subsequently activate as needed. The key lies in utilizing systems to identify potential volunteers and communicate with those possessing desired characteristics for specific tasks. The integration of a mobile application could greatly facilitate this process.

Such practices will allow nonprofit organizations to deploy the right volunteers, in the right quantity, at the right time.

Lessons for Managers

Our research offers insights for nonprofit managers grappling with the management of volunteer relationships. We show the value that lies in distant, non-escalating relationships when managed in symbiosis with classic growth-oriented relationships. Our results point to broader implications for brand relationship management, applicable to both nonprofit and for-profit entities.

Traditional volunteering mirrors consumer–brand relationships in which individuals develop strong ties with brands and often integrate in brand communities. This type of relationship permeates marketing and consumer studies. The new volunteers we study resemble consumers who maintain a more distant and seemingly disinterested relationship with brands that they consume sporadically but regularly, without a desire to intensify the relationship. We call this a “Neither Growing nor Fading” (NGNF) relationship. NGNF relationships arguably represent a significant proportion of the interactions that consumers typically have with brands, yet there is little research to date that has focused on them.

Here are some strategies for managers to acquire and activate NGNF members:

• Actively embrace the new volunteering logic and accept that volunteers become dormant between activations.

• Develop partnerships with broadcasters to reach large audiences and communicate the organization’s volunteering story and needs via social media to generate traffic on the organization’s platforms.

• Know volunteer needs by identifying volunteer profiles for each specific volunteer job. Identify key skillset information to include in the registration form, such as education and training.

• Develop some material element to identify volunteers during their activation (light jackets, baseball caps, etc.). These materials could be lent to volunteers for the duration of their activation.

Source: Verena Gruber and Jonathan Deschênes, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Individual charitable giving in the United States reached a record high of , growing 2.2% from 2019 during a year beset by a global pandemic and racial turmoil. The donations, however, were split among more than , all competing for dollars, time, and other gifts.

Individual nonprofits might be lucky to launch one successful charity campaign, such as the viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Most simply seek to maintain steady donations year-over-year.

To boost their donation rate, nonprofits must ensure potential donors identify with their charitable appeals. The following five research-based strategies can allow nonprofits to use identity to increase charitable donations and remove the guesswork from their campaigns.

Make It Moral

Extensive research has shown that social identities, the categories into which people place themselves based on profession, gender, family, and religion, influence behavior. Individuals also have moral identities, which define the extent to which traits like being kind are important to them.

Research has found that moral identity affects charitable giving. find that those reporting a strong moral identity believe giving time is more ethical than giving money. Importantly for nonprofits, even consumers not consistently valuing moral traits can shift donation patterns when the traits are made salient, such as in donation appeals referencing kindness and compassion.

In their 2007 study, Reed and colleagues found individuals were 458% more likely to donate time than money when the researchers made moral traits salient by asking participants to donate to a moral organization, such as the American Red Cross.

In a recently published Journal of Marketing Research study, found donating reduced the gap in participants’ desired level of moral identity versus what they perceived as their actual moral identity. The change subsequently increased participants’ donation amount.

Gender Matters

In Shang and colleagues’ 2020 research, eliciting moral identity in donation appeals boosted giving among males and females differently. Women, socialized to be communal, nurturing, and interdependent, tended to find giving reinforced their moral identity more than it did for men. In a field experiment, women calling into a nonprofit radio station fundraiser increased donations by 21% on average when the experimenter answering the phone said, “Thank you for being a caring and helping [station name] member.”

Gender also affects donation targets. Because women tend to place greater importance on relationships than men do, they typically show moral regard to a broader circle. found women therefore donated more than men to outgroup individuals. The researchers asked American study participants to donate to Indian Ocean Tsunami victims or Hurricane Katrina victims or make no donation. Women with a self-reported strong moral identity donated nearly twice as much to the outgroup Tsunami victims than did men with a self-reported strong moral identity. Both men and women donated equally to Hurricane Katrina victims. Nonprofits must therefore align their donation appeals with their targets, heightening moral identity particularly among women when the recipient may be perceived as an outgroup.

Hit a Moving Target

Nonprofits sometimes find it challenging to encourage consumers in developed countries, such as the United States, to donate to individuals in developing countries. However, recently found the number of residential moves a person makes in a given period of time can increase outgroup donations.

When the researchers asked U.S. residents to donate to hungry children in another country, participants who had moved donated 40% more than did those who had never moved. The researchers suggest the increase occurred because consumers with great mobility have a strong global identity, seeing themselves as world citizens and donating accordingly.

Match Identities

Just as individuals donate more to ingroups than outgroups, donors are more likely to give when they identify with a charity than when they do not. For example, university students in one study were more likely to purchase a product when it precipitated a donation to a local charity than when the donation was made to a non-local charity or the purchase price was discounted (). In other words, the individuals preferred a donation to a discount, but only when they identified with the receiving charity.

Winterich and Barone suggest that, fortunately, all consumers represent a multitude of target markets, as they hold an array of identities, such as those pertaining to their alma mater, profession, gender, and hobbies. Charitable organizations must therefore identify and target the identities aligned with their mission.

In addition to identity congruence with a charity, consumers’ identity congruence with other donors can influence giving. During another public radio station fundraising experiment, told new call-in donors that a separate male or female member contributed $240. Participants’ donations increased by 27% on average, from $105 to more than $140, when the stated gender matched their own.

Motivate with Recognition

Donor recognition can be costly. One study found that approximately 50% of givers donate without requiring recognition (). Nonprofits should therefore not use their limited resources to recognize such individuals.

However, a segment of givers motivated by recognition exists among the remaining 50%. According to the 2013 study, the individuals tend to report a strong moral identity rooted in the social expression of their morality to others. Notably, the researchers point out nonprofits can motivate the individuals to donate through low-cost recognition channels, such as social media posts.

Summary

Identities drive many individuals’ behaviors, including donation decisions. When donors value morality or are prompted to think about being kind, donations increase. Nonprofits should therefore use morality-priming language in donation solicitations, particularly when targeting women. Individuals are more likely to donate when they identify with a charity, the recipients, or even other donors. And when nonprofits seek donations for outgroups, they are likely to be most effective when targeting women and individuals with high residential mobility. Lastly, not all donors are motivated by recognition of their efforts, but nonprofits can offer it at minimal cost to motivate those seeking to demonstrate their morality to others.

Citation

Winterich, Karen Page, and Americus Reed II, (2023), “Using Identity to Secure Nonprofit Donations,” Impact at JMR,(April 11, 2023), Available at: /marketing-news/using-identity-to-secure-nonprofit-donations/

References

Reed, Americus, Karl Aquino, and Eric Levy (2007), “Moral Identity and Judgments of Charitable Behaviors,” Journal of Marketing, 71 (1), 178–193.

Shang, Jen, Americus Reed, Adrian Sargeant, and Kathryn Carpenter (2020), “Marketplace Donations: The Role of Moral Identity Discrepancy and Gender,” Journal of Marketing Research, 57 (2), 375–393.

Shang, Jen, Americus Reed, and Rachel Croson (2008), “Identity Congruency Effects on Donations,” Journal of Marketing Research, 45 (3), 351–361.

Wang, Yajin, Amna Kirmani, and Xiaolin Li (2021), “Not Too Far to Help: Residential Mobility, Global Identity, and Donations to Distant Beneficiaries,” Journal of Consumer Research, 47 (6), 878–889. 

Winterich, Karen Page, and Michael J. Barone (2011), “Warm Glow or Cold, Hard Cash? Social Identity Effects on Consumer Choice for Donation versus Discount Promotions,” Journal of Marketing Research, 48 (5), 855–868.

Winterich, Karen Page, Vikas Mittal, and Karl Aquino (2013), “When Does Recognition Increase Charitable Behavior? Toward a Moral Identity-based Model,” Journal of Marketing 77(3), 121–134.

Winterich, Karen Page, Vikas Mittal, and William T. Ross, Jr., (2009), “Donation Behavior toward In-Groups and Out-Groups: The Role of Gender and Moral Identity,” Journal of Consumer Research, 3 (2), 199–214. 

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Firms frequently launch group-buying promotions that offer a discount when a certain number of buyers commit to the deal. Political parties urge millions of voters to rally around a candidate. Organizations ask individuals for donations to collectively reach a financial target.

When campaigns involve efforts from multiple individuals, marketers seek to tailor the message to persuade them to join the campaign. These collective goals require many people to make a one-off contribution, and people can choose to support the goal at any stage of the completion process—while leaving the final outcome in others’ hands. Specifically, people who contribute money to these causes have no past interaction with the collective goal and, in most cases, cannot put in more effort to ensure its eventual success.

Marketers often disclose information about the remaining distance toward completion when soliciting a contribution in a collective campaign. For example, “$0.86 million has been raised to meet the target of $1 million” or “23,000 people have signed a petition that needs 100,000 participants.” As the remaining distance toward completion changes, the effectiveness of different persuasive messages should change accordingly.

In a , we examine how marketers can use different messaging to persuade people to contribute to a collective goal. Our research team addresses the specific question of the type of message – fact-based vs. affected-based – that is more effective in eliciting participation based on how near the goal is to completion. 

Fact-Based vs. Affect-Based Appeals

Seven studies demonstrate that the relative impact of fact-based versus affect-based appeals changes with varying distance to the completion of the collective goal. We find that when the distance to the completion of a collective goal is large, the path to the end remains uncertain. As a result, people who are deciding whether to contribute to the goal may question if and how the collective goal can be accomplished. This consideration tends to be thinking-oriented and reasoning-based (e.g., “Is this feasible?” or “What needs to be done?”). Thus, fact-based appeals better match consumers’ thinking-oriented psychological state—and are more effective in persuasion.

By comparison, when the collective goal is nearing completion, people tend to base their decision on whether the goal is valuable and worth contributing to. The value assessment usually involves simulating the outcome and imagining the emotional reaction to reaching the goal, a process that relies on feelings and emotions (e.g., “How would I feel about being part of this?”). Therefore, when the distance to the collective goal completion is small, affect-based appeals better match consumers’ feelings-oriented psychological state and should be more effective in persuasion.

The findings in this research advance understanding the effectiveness of persuasive messages in the context of collective goals. Because the distance remaining to completing the goal plays a role in consumers’ psychological state, their tendency to follow a persuasive message depends heavily on whether these messages match their psychological state of thinking or feeling. These conditions require marketers to focus on the audience’s situational psychological state and match it to the appropriate persuasive message.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

This research is particularly relevant in today’s marketplace as social media and digital platforms play an increasingly central role in campaigns. Technology not only enables real-time tracking and sharing of information about the progress toward the goal in collective campaigns but also makes it possible for marketers to change the content of persuasive messages midway through the campaign to suit the context and to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Our findings offer the following key insights for marketers trying to elicit more participation in collective goals:

• The use of fact-based appeals might be more useful early in a collective campaign, but marketers should consider switching to appeals that focus on feelings as the campaign gets closer to the target. For example, when universities ask for donations from alumni to reach a campaign goal, they should consider fact-based messages such as school ranking, educational performance, and information about student and faculty diversity when the fundraising target is still far away. However, they should switch to affect-based appeals and evoke more emotional elaboration as the total amount gets closer to the target.

• Marketers should consider employing an appropriate mix of textual versus visual communication at different stages of their campaigns. Whereas visual illustrations with text and less feeling-based messages may be effective at an early stage of campaigns, marketers may wish to include more affect-rich visuals to evoke stronger emotions to push the goal over the finish line in the more advanced stages. 

From: Liyin Jin, Yajin Wang, and Ying Zhang, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Among the sectors hit hard by the current economic downturn, one is often overlooked: charities. With fears of a global recession, exacerbated by the that Europe must prepare for the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, many charities are struggling for donations. As austerity measures take hold across the globe, many nonprofits, especially small ones, are reevaluating fundraising plans.

Donations accounted for almost 70% of the estimated $470 billion in 2020 revenues for U.S. charities, according to Giving USA. Past research has proposed various strategies to increase individuals’ motivation to donate, such as to distinguish “pure” motives such as altruism from “impure” motives like seeking to increase one’s reputation. Some researchers have argued that most donors give based on spontaneous affective reactions, such as when moved by identifiable victims.

In a , we offer inexpensive strategies to make fundraising campaigns more effective. Our research team finds that allowing donors to choose the charitable project to which their gifts will be dedicated can increase fundraising revenues dramatically. We conducted a series of experiments and a large-scale field study involving more than 40,000 donors to document this effect and understand how it works.

The Power of Agency

Agency is a crucial concept in charitable giving. Donors depend on the charity (the agent) to perform a philanthropic service, and they contribute because they believe in the charity’s mission and its ability to execute it efficiently. Yet it is up to the charity to decide how to spend the collected funds, and there are bound to be instances when charities use funds for purposes not valued by the donors (e.g., overhead). Many donors rely on watchdogs like CharityWatch to inform them about how charities use their money.

We propose that offering donors a greater sense of agency can be a way out. In a series of studies, we find that enhancing donors’ belief that they can control the external world through their actions will motivate them to donate. By allowing donors to choose—or target—a specific charitable project, we offer them a greater sense of control over the allocation of the charity’s resources.

In our experiment, the charity describes three unique projects when sending fundraising requests. Some donors could express their preferences and determine which charitable projects to fund. Other donors did not receive the opportunity to control how the charity should allocate its resources. The interventions, though relatively straightforward to implement, are extraordinarily effective.

We find that donors reacted positively to the opportunity to determine the target of their donation, increasing fundraising revenues by 42%. Our results show that donors experienced a greater “sense of agency” when they could tell the charity what to do with their money.

The Value of Loyalty

Our research also unveils another vital insight for fundraising managers: Not all donors value the opportunity to decide how charities should spend their budget. Those who do care are the most loyal, active, and generous donors, and those who do not have strong habits. For example, donors who give exclusively during the holiday seasons or give a fixed amount every month do not react much to the opportunity to choose a specific charitable project.

Our findings offer two key takeaways for charities:

• Rather than sending solicitation requests to all donors, charities can design a more effective fundraising campaign when contacting a select set of donors and only offering a subset of them the possibility to decide which project their gift will fund.

• Because the more engaged donors (as captured by a longer tenure and/or larger, more recent, more frequent, and less clumpy gifts) were particularly responsive to our experiments, we suggest focusing on these donors.

For those managing a charity and overseeing fundraising activities, here are some lessons to optimize the next campaign:

1. Consider empowering your donors by having them decide what project they want to fund, but only do this for your most engaged donors.
2. Determine which donors appreciate being in control of projects to fund. For example, let one random half of your donors choose a charitable project and contact the other half, but do not let them choose. Comparing donations across these conditions will identify whom to contact with what type of request in future fundraising campaigns.
3. Learn more about how to leverage such data to optimize your next campaign by checking our open-science repository at . The code will allow you to determine which donor to target and what to communicate to them to maximize the chance of donations.

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From: Emilie Esterzon, Aurélie Lemmens, and Bram Van den Bergh, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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From: Phyllis Wang, Yijie Wang, and Yuwei Jiang, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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