Article Why Do Donors Donate? Examining the Effects of Organizational Identification and Identity Salience on the Relationships among Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Donation Behavior

With an empirical study in two nonprofit industries (a money-collecting and blood-collecting organization), the authors investigate how organizational identification and identity salience together function in relation to satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior. They develop and test a model that best represents relationships featuring donor-nonprofit identification and donor identity salience in existing satisfaction-loyalty studies. Overall, the study empirically confirms that donor-nonprofit identification and donor iden-tity salience are distinct constructs and that both have direct positive effects on loyalty, but not that much on donations. Within the money donation context, both identification constructs have stronger total effects on donor loyalty than donor satisfaction, whereas in the blood donation context, donor satisfaction has a stronger effect on loyalty. In testing the causal direction between donor-nonprofit identification and donor satisfaction, the authors also find that the path should be conceptualized from satisfac-tion to identification. The study contributes to the theory of organizational identification and identity salience by highlighting the advantages of taking a combined theoretical approach. Finally, the study suggests several means to implement donor identification management, including group activities, development of online communities, donor events, and more long-term-oriented tactics, all of which treat the donor as a cocreator of value. Keywords organizational identification, identity salience, customer-company identification, donor-nonprofit identification, donor identit