What Gives? Leveraging Marketing Knowledge to Increase Consumers’ Charitable Giving

Marketing plays a central role in nonprofit organizations that compete for the donations of individual consumers to achieve their respective missions. To this end, marketing researchers and practitioners have devoted much attention to the antecedents of charitable giving and ways in which solicitations may be made more effective and efficient. This gives rise to the questions: “What has the field learned?” and, relatedly, “What novel effects have not yet been explored?” Within this dissertation, three essays address these questions through the use of multiple methodologies. The first essay seeks to outline what the marketing field has learned about consumers’ charitable giving and what avenues exist for future research through the use of a systematic literature review. Building upon extant review frameworks to construct a nomological network of consumers’ charitable giving, this essay presents findings from an examination of 147 articles published in top marketing journals during the twenty-first century. The nomological network reveals that scholars have primarily focused on donors and fundraisers rather than the characteristics of beneficiaries, yet donors’ feelings and perceptions toward all three actors are important motivators of donation behavior. Importantly, an overview of the most frequently examined constructs, as well as those that are under-studied, are reported for each piece of the nomological network to identify opportunities for enhancing marketing researchers’ understanding of consumers’ charitable giving. Essay Two explores one opportunity identified in the systematic literature review: the influence of semantic framing on donation behavior. Within this essay, two semantic frames are explored: giving to charity and keeping for oneself. Although extant literature may predict either frame to be more effective, the results of two experiments demonstrate that the give to charity frame is superior to the keep for self frame in generating donations. Essay Two concludes with opportunities for future research, including the identification of the mechanism responsible for the effect. Finally, Essay Three builds upon essay two to uncover a novel mechanism responsible for the differences in donations across semantic frames. Specifically, this essay demonstrates that consumers’ psychological ownership of their monetary resources impacts their donation behavior. Utilizing a field study and multiple online experiments, the relationship between semantic framing and psychological ownership is established. Findings suggest that the ubiquitous give to charity frame is less effective than the keep for charity frame, as it increases the salience of psychological ownership and reduces giving relative to the latter frame. A practical intervention that serves as a boundary condition of the effect is also presented. Collectively, the essays of this dissertation provide an overview of marketing’s understanding of consumers’ charitable giving and examine previously untested relationships. The results of multiple experiments not only enhance the field’s understanding of consumer behavior but also offer opportunities for future research within the domain of charitable giving. Given the importance of individual consumers’ donation behavior in the nonprofit sector, the novel ideas and effects demonstrated within these works are of interest to both scholars and practitioners alike