Benefactor- versus Recipient-Focused Charitable Appeals: How to Leverage In-Group Bias to Promote Donations for Out-Group Recipients

Abstract

Charities often feature their recipients as protagonists in fundraising appeals (i.e., recipient-focused appeals), and considerable research has examined the best way to portray recipients to generate more donations. However, recipient-focused appeals have been accused of being uninclusive and manipulative, stereotyping or even exploiting groups they seek to help. Strategies like using an identified victim and highlighting their neediness may not always be efficacious or desirable (e.g., when donors experience emotional fatigue or when victims wish to remain anonymous), and some techniques that work for in-group members are less effective for out-group recipients. To offset in-group donation biases and promote equity, the present work proposes that charities use benefactor-focused appeals featuring people who carry out the charity’s mission. Drawing on social identity and self-categorization theories, we generate hypotheses about how an in-group benefactor-focused appeal enhances donations for out-group members and equalizes charitable giving across in-group and out-group recipients. Four studies and a supplemental study involving both donation likelihood and actual donations find that the effect of charity appeal protagonist (recipient versus benefactor) is moderated by recipients’ group membership and mediated by feelings of connectedness. Together, the results support an in-group favoritism account for both benefactor- and recipient-focused appeals on donation behavior.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In all MTurk studies, participants were restricted to U.S.-based workers with 95% or higher human intelligence task (HIT) rate approval. Participants who failed to complete studies were excluded. No other restrictions or exclusions were made.

2 We conducted additional robustness checks for all experiments by including age and gender as covariates. Our hypothesized effects remained significant (see Supplemental Online Appendix B).

3 The number of people who donated in each condition did not differ (in-group benefactor 24.56% versus out-group victim 19.64% versus out-group benefactor 32.08%; all ps >.13).

4 G*Power analyses based on the effect sizes from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest 600 participants for six conditions.

5 We also conducted additional exploratory analyses (i.e., moderated serial mediation analyses) by testing feelings of connectedness (M1) and moral elevation (M2) in serial. Results are presented in Supplemental Online Appendix D.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bingqing (Miranda) Yin

Bingqing (Miranda) Yin (PhD, University of Kansas) is an assistant professor of marketing, Orfalea College of Business, California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.

Yexin Jessica Li

Yexin Jessica Li (PhD, Arizona State University) is the dean’s/Frank S. Pinet professor of marketing, School of Business, University of Kansas.