Motivating charitable giving : the interaction of affective images and goal-framing on donation intention

Abstract

Charitable organizations face difficult decisions regarding how to enhance the effectiveness of their appeals in eliciting donations. While these advertisements often include victim imageries, it remains unclear as to whether the use of positive or negative pictures are more persuasive. Also, importantly, images are not typically presented alone, but in the presence of other text features. The interactions among the features may determine the joint influence on donation behaviours. In this study (N = 526), we investigated the effect of affective images and message framing on motivating charitable giving by means of a 2 (affective image: happy versus sad) x 2 (goal framing: gain versus loss) between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to view one of four charity advertisements that consisted of a victim picture and a framed solicitation message and were asked to decide how much they would be willing to donate to the charity. The results revealed that sad images were more effective than happy images in donation solicitation, while goal framing did not have any significant main effect. During our analysis, gender was also found to be a contributing factor influencing giving, and therefore it has been taken into account when considering the interaction effect of affective images and goal framing on donation intention. We found that loss-framed messages magnified the effect of negative imagery for males, leading to a significantly higher contribution. However, for females, neither gain-framed nor loss-framed messages influenced the effects of affective images on donation. This work not only contributes to the understanding of the joint effect of pictorial images and goal framing on giving behaviour, but also suggests that non-profit organizations should tailer their ads to target men and women differently.