Charitable Giving in the Context of Unfamiliar Organizations: The Effectiveness of Construal Level Theory in Predicting Donating Intentions and Antecedents

ABSTRACT

Charitable organizations continue to increase in the United States. Procuring charitable donations and meeting fundraising goals can be challenging for new organizations. Mental representations, or construals of phenomena, often drive charitable behaviors, preferences, and choices. Healthy Homes for Healthy Living (HHHL) focuses on reconstructing houses to prevent vectors that spread Chagas disease in rural communities in Ecuador. Drawing upon construal level theory (CLT), we explored charitable giving behaviors of potential donors. Our findings revealed: (a) smaller psychological distances did not influence charitable giving, and (b) message recipients showed favorable attitudes toward unfamiliar charities dealing with unfamiliar issues. We offer implications for CLT application in the context of charitable giving and fundraising by new charitable organizations and intention to share messages.

KEYWORDS:

• Construal level theory
• charitable giving
• Chagas disease
• psychological distance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The funding information has been removed for masked peer review of this manuscript and has been submitted as a separate document which can be added later into this section. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript;Ohio University [Graduate Research Grant #1804,Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador Grant].