CHARITY ORGANIZATIONS ADOPTING VIRTUAL REALITY MODALITY: THEORIZATION AND VALIDATION

ABSTRACT

Communicators of charity organizations have begun to adopt virtual reality modality to draw in more donors in recent years. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical exploration and empirical verification on the avenues that may optimize the function of virtual reality modality for communication conducted by charity organizations. To fill this gap, the current study proposes and validates a framework based on integrative extension of theories pertaining to enactive cognition, media affordances, and personal norm. As the research result suggests, the five immersive affordance attributes of vividness, authenticity, coherence, interactivity, and controllability are primary facilitators of empathy and personal norm activation in the virtual reality context. The type of virtual reality modality, which provides immersive affordance attributes to exercise the transformative change effect, serves to elicit charitable donation intention through evocation of empathy and personal norm activation as the two key mediators. More noteworthy, the positive impact of empathy on charitable donation intention significantly increases due to the partial mediating effect of personal norm activation. Overall, the research result contributes to enhancing the effectiveness of communication conducted by charity organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Charitable donation
• empathy
• immersive affordance
• personal norm
• virtual reality modality

Author profile

Shu-pei Tsai, Distinguished Professor of strategic communication at the Ph.D. Program in Communication Studies of Shih Hsin University, has published a number of papers in such renowned academic journals as Business Horizons, Current Issues in Tourism, European Management Journal, International Business Review, International Journal of Research in Marketing, International Journal of Technology Management, International Journal of Tourism Research, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, and Service Industries Journal. Besides, he used to serve as a regional strategic consultant for Effem Inc., Procter & Gamble and 3M.