Understanding approaches to social partnerships - investigating target audience reactions and non-profit managers’ business practice: a mixed-methods study

ABSTRACT

If social partnerships can lead to favourable outcomes for not-for-profit organisations (NPOs), what steps are managers taking to achieve such outcomes? We address this question by conducting a mixed-methods study in a professional sports social partnership context in Australia. First, a survey with 4,193 sport team fans – a key target audience for NPOs was conducted to understand the impact of contextual factors (i.e. NPO reputation and perceived fit) on the consumer behaviour process, including donation, volunteer, and advocacy intentions for NPOs involved in a social partnership. Following the confirmation of favourable NPO outcomes, interviews with 11 NPO managers were conducted to explore the business practice inputs of their social partnerships. Interviews showed social partnerships were characterised by a power imbalance in favour of the sports organisation leading to a lack of co-creation of value. Further, despite an expressed intention to formalise the partnerships, formality waned as the partnership moved through the different partnership stages. Results across the two studies demonstrate the need for a more deliberate and strategic approach to social partnerships. Theoretically, we build on the limited work addressing the NPO perspective of social partnerships by adopting a dual stakeholder perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Social partnerships
• not-for-profit organisations
• consumer behaviour
• reputation
• perceived fit

Introduction

It is common for NPOs to form partnerships with commercial organisations to achieve both instrumental goals and address social issues (Harrison et al., 2022; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2014; van Tulder et al., 2016). So prominent is this strategy that the United Nations includes collaborations as one of their 2030 sustainable development objectives, highlighting that through collaborative efforts, the preceding sixteen objectives can be achieved (United Nations, 2022). The increased adoption of social partnerships is driven by commercial organisations that recognise such partnerships can be used as a mechanism to achieve success and NPOs, who look to social partnerships to achieve numerous financial and non-financial benefits. These include donations or philanthropic investment, profile raising, greater legitimacy and accountability, and access to networks (Harrison et al., 2022; Herlin, 2015; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2013). For these positive outcomes to be realised, NPOs are reliant on both internal and external partnership factors. Externally, they look to consumers associated with their partner organisation to react favourably towards the NPO through donations, volunteering, and word-of-mouth (Harrison et al., 2021). However, often this process can be influenced by contextual factors (e.g. perceived fit and NPO reputation) concerning social partnerships (Harrison et al., 2022). Internally, they rely on an efficient partnership process with their corporate partner to achieve favourable consumer outcomes. Yet, this process can also be beset by various factors, such as power imbalances and lack of commitment on behalf of the corporate partner (Herlin, 2015; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2013), often leading to poor outcomes at both the internal and external levels.

Current research to date has generated important insights regarding social partnership success, but the vast majority has adopted the perspective of the corporation involved in the partnership (e.g. Rim et al., 2016), with scarce attention given to NPOs (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2021; Harrison et al., 2022). As such, within current academic work, little is known about how the NPO approaches these arrangements, despite calls from previous marketing researchers to address the NPO perspective (Harrison, 2019; Harrison et al., 2021). More recently, research has attempted to bridge this gap by understanding how a partnership with a commercial firm influences support for NPO outcomes. For example, Harrison et al. (2022) show that a high-fit, short-duration partnership led to increased donation levels, volunteering, and word-of-mouth intention.

While a greater understanding of the NPO perspective regarding social partnerships is emerging, research is nascent and there remain gaps in our understanding. Principally, of the few studies that consider NPOs in social partnerships, the focus has been either purely on NPO business practice input into such arrangements (e.g. Herlin, 2015) or consumer-related outcomes (e.g. Harrison et al., 2022), without consideration of how one relates to the other. Of those that have considered consumer outcomes, much of the existing research has either utilised panel data (e.g. Harrison et al., 2022) or student samples in experiments (e.g. Lichtenstein et al., 2004). Therefore, the reaction of a key target audience group towards the NPO (i.e. the partner organisation’s consumer base) has rarely been captured despite NPOs partnering with commercial organisations to reach their current consumer base (Rayne et al., 2020). Also, while research has begun to examine consumer reactions to NPOs, more is needed to gain deeper insights into the impacts of contextual factors surrounding social partnerships on consumer reactions and favourable outcomes for NPOs. In current research addressing NPO business practice, a more deliberate approach to managing the partnership, as well as recognition by corporate partners that NPOs should play a stronger participatory role, have been suggested as keys to success (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019; Clarke & Fuller, 2010; Tsarenko & Simpson, 2017). However, knowledge regarding commitment, shared values, reciprocity, and formality of such arrangements from the NPO perspective requires more insight. These key gaps imply that the full extent of the effectiveness of social partnerships for NPOs is not well understood. This issue is vital because NPOs invest their limited resources in social partnerships to achieve critical financial and non-financial outcomes.

Understanding how to manage the development of social partnerships is important to marketers in an NPO and commercial context as the partnership leads to mutual gain where parties can achieve more together on common or related goals than alone (Liu & Ko, 2011). In the case of the commercial partner, social partnerships may enhance their ability to gain and maintain customers by achieving important cause-related goals that appeal to their customer base. For the NPO, this may increase funding and support for causes by raising the profile of a cause, legitimising the NPO brand in relation to that cause, and providing access to consumer groups otherwise difficult to reach (Harrison et al., 2022; Herlin, 2015; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2013).

The purpose of this current study is to focus on the NPO side of these kinds of partnerships. Specifically, to examine whether strategic social partnerships improve marketing outcomes for NPOs. We explore the nature of partnership development to better understand the practical implications for NPOs who are looking to partner with commercial organisations. Consequently, we are concerned with two areas of enquiry, which take in both a consumer and an organisational perspective: Are social partnerships an effective way for NPOs to achieve positive outcomes with a partner organisation’s existing customer base? If so, how do established NPOs approach the different stages of the partnership and participate in decisions to achieve their goals?

We adopt a mixed-methods study to answer these questions capturing both the target audience reactions to NPOs and NPO business practice input into social partnerships. We examine this in a professional sports context where social partnerships are particularly prevalent (Rowe et al., 2019). Specifically, there is a history of NPOs looking to professional sports teams (e.g. UNICEF and Barcelona Football Club; Brooklyn Nets and Food Bank For New York City) to help achieve both instrumental marketing outcomes (e.g. increased donations) and social objectives (e.g. social issue awareness) (Inoue et al., 2013). Professional sports teams are attractive for NPOs given their high-profile, passionate fan bases, mass media and communications power, youth appeal, positive health impacts, and access to diverse stakeholders (Inoue et al., 2013). In addition, sports teams are increasingly more willing to show support for important sociopolitical issues and often seek to partner with NPOs to aid this. For example, Manchester United has partnered with Stonewall to celebrate LGBTQ+ inclusion (Manchester United, 2020). Finally, professional sports provide opportunity to generalise strategic social partnerships across other contexts given their strong community profile (Lacey & Kennett-Hensel, 2010) and professional sports teams for-profit focus (Inoue et al., 2017; Lacey & Kennett-Hensel, 2010).

The current research makes a key theoretical contribution to NPO marketing and management literature (e.g. Harrison et al., 2022; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2014), by examining whether stages theorised, and observed, in partnership development in commercial relationships are evident in NPO-partner organisation relationships. From a practical perspective, we provide insight for NPO managers from both a consumer reaction and business practice input level in order to develop stronger strategies concerning their social partnerships.

This paper is organised as follows. First, we provide a theoretical background into the NPO perspective on social partnerships, leading to a conceptual framework and hypotheses. The methodology is then outlined, including an initial quantitative study, followed by the qualitative component of our mixed-methods study. This is followed by a presentation of results, and a general discussion, including both theoretical and managerial implications. Finally, we provide a conclusion, limitations, and opportunities for future research.

Theoretical background

Government functional and fiscal pressures, increased social problems and improved business-community engagement has seen social partnerships increase exponentially (Ashraf et al., 2017). A concomitant interest in understanding social partnerships as a viable strategic solution to various economic and social problems has grown in both business practice and academia (van Tulder et al., 2016).

As highlighted previously, for NPOs, there are financial and non-financial benefits associated with partnering with a commercial firm/sports team. Specifically, NPOs may look to sports teams as a means of achieving various marketing goals, such as profile raising by reaching new audiences, including fans of the sports team to improve supportive intentions towards their organisation (Rayne et al., 2020; Rowe et al., 2019). However, whether social partnerships are effective for NPOs in reaching the loyal consumers associated with the partner organisations remains unclear. As such, we first call on previous social partnership literature and a hierarchy-of-effects (Lavidge & Steiner, 1961) theoretical framework to develop an integrated conceptual model to guide the examination of this in Study 1. The following briefly introduces the hierarchy-of-effects model before its framework is used to conceptualise relationships used to inform Study 1.

Beginning with the generation of cognition, the hierarchy-of-effects dictates that affective evaluations will then occur. In this study, we propose that targeted audience members are likely to first become aware of the partnership between the NPO and sports team and to then have an emotive response. However, among the target audience, we expect this relationship to be moderated by the reputation of the partner organisation, in this case, the NPO. NPO reputation is a strong driver of affective reactions towards NPOs (Melendéz, 2001), including NPOs involved in a social partnership (Harrison et al., 2021, 2022). Subsequent to affective reactions, the hierarchy-of-effects suggests consumers move to the conative stage. Existing literature indicates that NPOs enter into social partnerships to achieve supportive outcomes such as donations, volunteers, and advocacy (Harrison et al., 2021; Lefroy & Tsarenko, 2013; Lichtenstein et al., 2004). This relationship is likely to be strengthened if the target audience perceives greater congruency between the partnering organisations. Current social partnership literature provides support for this (e.g. Harrison et al., 2022; Maktoufi et al., 2020; Vafeiadis et al., 2021), and therefore, we include fit as a moderating variable between social partnership attitude and subsequent outcomes. This is now further explained via hypotheses development, along with the other relationships proposed here, and also depicted in the conceptual model presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Conceptual model.

Hypotheses development

Social partnership awareness

Consumer awareness of social initiatives has been cited as a critical component to social activity success or failure (Pomering & Dolnicar, 2009). According to Keller’s (2003) Associative Network Memory Model, semantic memory consists of a series of memory nodes and links. These nodes, which are stored information, go through a ‘spreading activation’ process when information is passed, which determines the extent of memory retrieval. A node can activate another node through external or internal information retrieval, and activation can spread from this node to others within memory. Once a threshold level is exceeded, the information contained in that node is recalled. To operationalise this for the social partnership context, when an activity such as social responsibility programs becomes imbedded, this spreads to a consumer’s active memory and produces a link between an organisation and its social partners.

Studies in the sponsorship literature have shown that awareness is important for attitude formation in collaborations between sports teams and their sponsors (Biscaia et al., 2013). NPOs target the same audience as commercial sponsoring firms for awareness and expect these audiences to react to support their objectives (e.g. sales or donations). Without awareness, these objectives will not be met (Biscaia et al., 2013). We expect the generation of awareness to be the first step to attitude formation in targeted audience members (Biscaia et al., 2013).

Furthermore, findings in the social partnership literature suggest that the attitude formation will extend to the dyad between the partnering organisations (Lafferty et al., 2004). Therefore, it is hypothesised that:

H1:

Awareness has a direct and positive effect on social partnership attitude.

Moderating effect of NPO reputation

Reputation has been examined in previous CSR research and shown to be a strong influencing factor in consumer reactions to organisation prosocial behaviour (Gistri et al., 2019). The term ‘corporate reputation’ can be somewhat nebulous given it cuts across several disciplines (e.g. management, economics, sociology, marketing) and consists of various conceptualisations. Within the marketing literature, researchers have conceptualised reputation through two key lenses- economic and institutional. The economic lens consists of insiders’ and/or outsiders’ views and estimations of specific organisational attributes, whereas the institutional approach is more globalist and incorporates the perception from a collective group of stakeholders (e.g. consumers, investors). The institutional view is more congruent with our study because we take a broad view of corporate reputation from the consumer perspective. As such, we follow Keh and Xie’s (2009) definition of corporate reputation which is ‘an overall evaluation of the extent to which a firm is substantially “good” or “bad”’ (p. 73).

Often overlooked in existing research, the reputation perceptions target audiences hold towards the NPO are important (Harrison et al., 2022). NPO reputation perceptions can be opposing, for example, NPOs may experience higher societal trust attribution given their focus on amending key social issues rather than traditional profit-oriented outcomes (Harrison et al., 2022). In contrast, studies have shown that public trust in NPOs can be surprisingly low, perhaps driven by publicised accounts of past malfeasance, charity saturation or intrusive solicitation methods (Hyndman & McConville, 2018). According to Melendéz (2001, p. 121) ‘ … donors do not contribute to organisations they do not trust and about which they do not feel confident’. Yet, a favourable NPO reputation can lead to multiple supportive intentions, including donations, volunteering, and word-of-mouth (Wiencierz et al., 2015). Given these conflicting outcomes found in existing literature, target audience perspectives of NPO reputation were considered important for this study.

In a social partnership setting, Harrison et al. (2022) showed that messages from an NPO with a higher reputation, compared to lower reputation, led to trust, commitment, satisfaction, and control mutuality. Moreover, Vafeiadis et al. (2021) demonstrated that highly reputable NPOs involved in a social partnership resulted in additional favourable attitudinal assessments of the NPO. In accordance with these findings, we propose that NPO reputation will play a moderating role between social partnership awareness and social partnership attitude in target audiences. The rationale underlying this assertion is that consumers’ perspectives of NPO reputation has been shown to influence target audience attitudes towards firms in a social partnership. We, thus, propose that the connection between social partnership awareness and social partnership attitude will be strengthened by a positive (versus negative) NPO reputation. Therefore,

H2:

NPO reputation moderates the relationship between social partnership awareness and positive social partnership attitude.

Social partnership attitude to behavioural intentions

Conation refers to the behavioural component of the consumer process and in accordance with the hierarchy-of-effects, supervenes affective assessments (Lavidge & Steiner, 1961). As a learned evaluation mechanism, attitudes often shape the perceptions of consumers, leading to favourable/unfavourable responses and behaviours (Keller, 2003). In a social partnership setting, consumers will often assess the partnership collectively, thus shaping their behaviour towards the organisations involved in the partnership, including NPOs (Irmak et al., 2015; Lafferty et al., 2004; Rayne et al., 2020).

Within most social partnership research, commercial firm outcomes have often been the focal point of researcher’s attention. Despite this, there is a growing body of work demonstrating that a positive attitude towards a social partnership can lead to NPO support by consumers (e.g. Harrison et al., 2021, 2022). This occurs because the partnership helps to increase awareness and interest in the NPO’s remit. It also occurs via the association with the commercial organisation, towards which consumers already hold favourable attitudes, as well as the value generated from the partnership to help the NPO achieve its mission (Vafeiadis et al., 2021).

Specifically, for NPOs, previous studies have shown that reactions from consumers following social partnership formation can include advocacy, intentions to donate money and volunteering for the NPO (Harrison et al., 2021, 2022; Irmak et al., 2015; Rayne et al., 2020). Given that these outcomes are vital for NPO survival, they form the outcome variables of our study. Therefore, it is hypothesised that:

H3:

Positive social partnership attitudes are directly and positively related to a) donation intention, b) NPO advocacy intention and c) volunteer intention.

Moderating effect of perceived fit

In sponsorship relationships, fit is ‘ … the most widely used theoretical concept related to the processing of sponsorship stimuli’ (Olson & Thjømøe, 2012, p. 57). This extends to social partnership relationships where previous researchers have indicated that consumer reactions to these relationships are contingent on perspectives of fit between the organisations (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006; Bigné-Alcañiz et al., 2012). Becker-Olsen et al. (2006, p. 47) define fit as ‘the perceived link between a cause and the firm’s product line, brand image, position, and/or target market’. As this definition suggests, perceived fit is broadly conceptualised. Simplified, perceived fit relates to consumers’ comfortability with the association among partners (Lafferty et al., 2004). In such relationships, high fit occurs when organisations in the partnership hold similar values or target similar audiences (Kuo & Rice, 2015), and the relationship seems organic and logical (Du et al., 2010).

Empirically, there is no consensus as to whether perceived fit impacts target audience reactions to organisations in a social partnership, particularly audience reactions to NPOs. For example, with a focus on NPO outcomes, Vafeiadis et al. (2021) highlight that perceived high fit has no bearing on donation, volunteer, and word-of-mouth intentions. Harrison et al. (2022) found partial support for the role of fit on NPO outcomes, demonstrating that mission accomplishment mediates the relationship between high-fit perceptions and NPO word-of-mouth intentions. While Maktoufi et al. (2020) suggest that fit can be manipulated and communicated in marketing messages, thus leading to intentions to engage in CSR activism, including volunteering and advocacy. While consensus is yet to be reached, many contributions have indicated a significant and positive effect (Bigné-Alcañiz et al., 2012; Harrison et al., 2022).

Given this, the current study suggests organisations engaging in social partnerships with congruent NPOs are likely to achieve stronger reactions than partnerships considered incongruent. Specifically, we suggest that target audience perceptions of high-fit relationships between the sports team and NPO will positively influence the strength of their relationship between social partnership attitude and NPO-oriented behaviours. This aligns with Bigné-Alcañiz et al. (2012) assertion that within cause-related marketing partnerships, fit plays a moderating role between attitude formation and supportive NPO behavioural outcomes. Therefore, we hypothesise that:

H4:

Perceived fit between the sports team and NPO moderates the relationship between positive social partnership attitude and a) donation intention, b) NPO advocacy intention and c) volunteer intention.

Having conceived the elements of good social partnerships, the next section outlines extant knowledge about the stages of partnership development before the methodology is described to examine each study.

Stages of partnership development

Earlier social partnership research has drawn attention to the numerous challenges faced by organisations entering a collaboration. While social partnerships are generally approached by both organisations with positive expectations, collaboration is often complex (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019). For example, social partnerships can be undermined by conflict between organisations, limited strategic direction, poor communication or coordination, distrust, power imbalances, negative reputation spillover (Gabrielli et al., 2021) and alternative perspectives regarding solutions (Selsky & Parker, 2005; Tsarenko & Simpson, 2017).

More recent work has focused on how to overcome challenges. For example, the adoption of a more deliberate strategy can result in stronger partnership outcomes. Specifically, for social partnerships to create the most value for society and organisations involved, they should be enacted collectively (Herlin, 2015), built on trust, commitment, complementarity, and compatibility (Tsarenko & Simpson, 2017). Like other strategic partnerships, they should be mutually beneficial and involve sharing of resources, knowledge, and capabilities (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019, 2021).

Focussing on the different stages of a social partnership- formation, implementation, and evaluation, is also considered an important part of acting deliberately to strengthen the relationship (Clarke & Fuller, 2010; Tsarenko & Simpson, 2017). Starting with formation, for a problem to be successfully addressed, potential partners need to identify the nature of the issue and why a collaboration will solve it (Waddell & Brown, 1997). This leads to analysis of the potential to enter such collaborations, via an assessment of the existence of possible partners, followed by identification of the most compatible organisations, including likelihood of cohesion (Jamali & Keshishian, 2009; Seitanidi et al., 2010). Here, NPOs will highlight to potential partners why their organisation provides an attractive offering for collaboration. They do this by indicating how they can impact society or create the capacity to help the organisation economically via positive CSR outcomes (e.g. raise business profile) (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019).

Various authors have highlighted challenges that can arise at the formation stage, such as obtaining a partner with good fit (Harrison et al., 2022; Maktoufi et al., 2020), clear problem definition (Jamali & Keshishian, 2009), complementarity of resources (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012), motives, and previous experience in engaging in collaboration (Bryson et al., 2006). Power imbalance is another issue at this stage where the commercial firm holds greater power given the stronger financial input into the social partnership (Herlin, 2015). Resource dependency gives explanation to this where organisations often enter social partnerships to access scarce resources of their partner organisation to achieve objectives (Ashraf et al., 2017). A balance of power may shift towards one of the organisations where the dependency on resources is asymmetric (Ashraf et al., 2017).

To avoid or overcome these issues, Waddell and Brown (1997) emphasised the importance of collaborative cohesion for a social partnership to be effective in the long-term. Other suggestions within the literature include leveraging interpersonal ties, recognition of the benefits of a more integrated approach to partnerships and recognition and development of collaborative boundaries where self-interest is protected (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019). Aligned with best practice highlighted in previous social partnership literature, where organisations identify collaboration to solve a social issue, we expect NPOs will recognise and highlight to potential partners the benefits they can offer. Further, we expect NPO managers to approach the formation stage of the partnership process with goal clarity and criteria for identifying an appropriate pool of partners to select, including potential partner cohesion. We also expect NPO managers to recognise associated benefits with the different types of partnerships (i.e. philanthropic to integrative), while creating boundaries around the partnership to maintain self-interest.

Once challenges associated with the formation stage are overcome, the social partnership moves into the implementation stage. The first step here is the selection of an appropriate partner (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009), followed by the development of partnership processes and operations (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012). Here, elements including objectives, rules and regulations, roles, structures, responsibilities, a memorandum of understanding (MoU), and decision-making authorities are formalised (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009).

Power imbalance can again cause issues at this stage of the partnership where NPOs expect to partake in joint decision-making, have frequent interaction and anticipate high-level management involvement (Herlin, 2015). However, power shifts characterised by poor communication, confusion and resource dependency can arise. To overcome these issues, previous research has indicated that a partnership requires a more strategic, integrated approach, consisting of a complementarity of resources to co-create value (e.g. Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019, 2021; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009). Trust and strong NPO identity have also been suggested as mechanisms for overcoming power imbalance (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2019).

In accordance with this view, we expect participants to take a deliberate and staged process of partnership selection, including consideration of what organisation provides the best form of community involvement. Once selected, we expect partnering firms to develop set partnership-related objectives, formalise the agreement via an MoU and outline roles, responsibilities, processes, and operations. We also expect that NPOs have mechanisms in play to overcome power imbalance and build strong relational ties.

Once the above has been implemented, managers evaluate partnership outcomes, and includes examining partnership interaction, marketing, and social issue outcomes. Given many organisations adopt social partnerships to address various objectives, it is important that partnership processes between the participating parties are assessed (van Tulder et al., 2016). Furthermore, appraising levels of strategic achievement is integral for understanding whether partnerships effectively deliver the necessary actions for targeted constituents. However, measuring outcomes is not straightforward and presents numerous challenges for NPOs (van Tulder et al., 2016). Specifically, the ambiguity in developing outcome measures is often a consequence of the wide-ranging, complex goals that underpin NPO activities (Herlin, 2015), including outcomes that cannot be measured in terms of financial performance. Some research has suggested that at the individual organisation level, NPOs can adopt certain criteria to measure social partnership effectiveness, including organisation size, realisation of firm goals, management effectiveness, increased public awareness and financial stability (Herman & Renz, 1998). Various authors have also outlined ‘anticipated’ benefits, yet, realised outcomes receive much less attention; highlighting the challenges of social partnership evaluation in practice and research (Clarke & Fuller, 2010; van Tulder et al., 2016).

In line with these challenges, we expect NPOs to take a fragmented approach to measurement of social partnership outcomes. Specifically, the complexities associated with external outcomes, such as society or policy impacts, will rarely be measured. However, we expect managers to measure outcomes according to their marketing objectives (e.g. donations), given the lower levels of complexity associated with measuring such outcomes.

Methodology

This research required two studies, which applied different methods, (quantitative and qualitative), and perspectives (consumer and organisational). In Study 1, we examine the effectiveness of social partnerships towards achieving positive social outcomes among a customer base. To do this, we administer a survey to over 4000 fans of professional sports teams. This survey examined the model depicted in Figure 1. Study 2 provides the organisational perspective by seeking a deeper understanding of how NPOs approach the different stages of the partnership and participate in decisions to achieve their goals. This required in-depth interviews with 11 NPO managers across 9 organisations who had social partnerships with professional sports teams.

Study 1

Data collection

To test our conceptual model and aid NPO marketers in assessing the potential reach of their social partnerships, data were collected using a probability, simple random sample of loyal sports team fans in two prominent sports in Australia. In total, data were gathered from a final sample of n = 4,193 across three professional sporting teams following a screening question (74.3% of original respondents were able to recognise the NPO partner among five options) and data cleaning. All social partnerships were between a professional sports team and NPO based in major cities in Australia. For professional sports team 1, the partnership with the NPO had been established for 16 years. This NPO provided financial support for the placement of breast cancer nurses in rural locations. Professional sports team 2 was in a 17-year partnership with an NPO dedicated to raising issues that are important to indigenous communities to parliamentarians. Professional sports team 3 partnered with the NPO since 2006 who provided care home facilities to underprivileged children. To obtain data, the professional sports teams agreed to email the online survey to membered sports fans (i.e. season-ticket holders) on their respective databases. An independent sample t-test was used to test for non-response bias on both early and late respondents. Here, means were compared on the main constructs where insignificant results showed an unlikelihood of non-response bias.

Across the three teams, most respondents were male (76.6%), aged between 45–54 (29.7%) with an annual income of $100,000 and above (23.1%).

Measures

All items consisted of pre-existing measures using both 7-point Likert and bipolar scales (1 = strongly disagree/extremely unlikely and 7 = strongly agree/extremely likely) and are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Items and data validation.

Construct	Factor loadings	α	CR	AVE
Social partnership awareness (Biedenbach et al., 2015; Sen et al., 2006): I am familiar with the social partnership between the [NPO] and [Sports team]. I can recognise this social partnership between the [NPO] and [Sports team] among other social partnerships. I can quickly recall the logo of the [NPO].	0.89 0.93 0.79	0.90	0.90	0.76
Social partnership attitude (Groza et al., 2011; Rifon et al., 2004) What is your attitude toward the social partnership between [Sports team] and [NPO]? Dislike: Like Unfavourable: Favourable Bad: Good Unpleasant: Pleasant	0.95 0.93 0.96 0.90	0.97	0.97	0.87
Reputation (Keh & Xie, 2009) [NPO] is a highly-regarded charity. [NPO] is a successful charity. [NPO] is a well-established charity.	0.90 0.90 0.90	0.93	0.93	0.81
Perceived fit (Speed & Thompson, 2000) There is a logical connection between [Sports team] and [NPO]. The image of [Sports team] and image of [NPO] are similar. [Sports team] and [NPO] fit together well. It makes sense that [Sports team] has a partnership with [NPO]. [Sports team] and [NPO] stand for similar things.*	0.88 0.58 0.91 0.91	0.87	0.90	0.69
Donation intention (Ranganathan & Henley, 2008) I am likely to donate money to [NPO]. I will donate money next time to [NPO]. I will definitely donate money to [NPO].	0.95 0.97 0.96	0.97	0.97	0.92
Advocacy intention (Lacey & Kennett-Hensel, 2010; Zeithaml et al., 1996) I am willing to encourage others to donate to [NPO]. When the topic of charities comes up in conversation, I will be willing to go out of my way to recommend donating to [NPO] to others. I will encourage friends and relatives to support [NPO]. I will say positive things about [NPO].	0.95 0.92 0.95 0.85	0.95	0.96	0.84
Volunteer intention (Ranganathan & Henley, 2008) I am likely to volunteer for [NPO]. I will volunteer next time for [NPO]. I will definitely volunteer for [NPO].	0.96 0.98 0.96	0.98	0.98	0.93

*denotes deleted item

Data analysis

To analyse the data, two-step structural equation modelling (SEM) was adopted using Mplus 8.6 (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). First, one-factor congeneric model testing was conducted where one item was removed from the perceived fit measure due to a high modification index with another perceived fit item. It was deemed the deletion of this item would have little bearing on the operationalisation of the construct, maintaining theoretical integrity. Following this, an overall confirmatory factor analysis was conducted incorporating all factors. To test for measurement model fit, Chi-square (χ²), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker-Lewisindex (TLI) and standardised root mean square residual (SRMR) were used.

Model fit indices showed acceptable model fit except for a significant χ² = 1408.16₍₂₃₁₎ (p = 0.00) which could be attributed to the large sample size. Other fit indices showed acceptable model fit (RMSEA = 0.04; CFI = 0.99; TLI = 0.99; SRMR = 0.03). As shown in Table 1, all factor loadings were above the minimum 0.50 (Hair et al., 2014). Further, Cronbach’s α scores and construct reliability (CR) values were above the 0.70 recommendation, and average variance extracted (AVE) values above the 0.50 suggested cut-off (Hair et al., 2014), thus consistency reliability and convergent validity were achieved. As shown in Table 2, the correlation coefficients of the focal constructs were lower than the square root AVE value across all constructs, indicating discriminant validity (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).

Table 2. Descriptive statistics and correlation matrix.

Construct	Mean	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
1. Awareness	6.02	1.16	0.87
2. Attitude	6.26	1.13	0.22**	0.93
3. Reputation	6.09	0.93	0.46**	0.42**	0.90
4. Fit	5.99	0.97	0.30**	0.56**	0.51**	0.83
5. Donation	4.83	1.66	0.23**	0.43**	0.41**	0.43**	0.96
6. Word-of-mouth	4.61	1.50	0.21**	0.48**	0.42**	0.48**	0.66**	0.92
7. Volunteer	3.10	1.50	0.12**	0.26**	0.22**	0.25**	0.48**	0.52**	0.96

Correlations are significant at **p < 0.01 (two-tailed). Diagonal elements are square root of AVE (bolded).

As reliability and validity were achieved, structural model testing was conducted with results depicted in Table 4 and discussed in further detail in the ‘Results’ section.

Table 3. Qualitative interview participants.

Organisation	Position	Social cause	Year est.	Facebook followers	Staff No.	Revenue (AU$) millions	Interview time (mins)
NPO 1	General Manager Marketing and Communications	Child violence	1997	40K	64	$17.9	61.55
NPO 2	Marketing Manager and Partnerships Manager	Health services	2014	8.7K	10	$4.2	56.41
NPO 3	Chief Executive Officer	Children with cancer	1995	8.8K	12	$2.1	77.41
NPO 4	General Manager	Disadvantaged youths	1890	4.4K	14	$4.3	65.14
NPO 5	Communications and Marketing Coordinator and General Manager	Child and adult disabilities	1997	4.3K	750	$64.1	61.39
NPO 6	Manager Corporate Partners and Fundraising	Youth mental health	2009	172.0K	228	$58.4	68.10
NPO 7	Policy and Program Manager – Sports Engagement Program	Domestic violence	2013	45K	84	$12.7	86.27
NPO 8	Communications Manager	Cancer	2002	13.3K	2,099	$41.2	60.23
NPO 9	Empowerment Programs Officer	Wounded service personnel	2012	92.5K	101	$11.2	52.18

Table 4. Path analysis results for the structural model estimation.

Path	β	t-value	Results
Awareness → Attitude	0.73***	27.14	H1: Supported
Reputation → Attitude	0.93***	33.27
Awareness x Reputation → Attitude	0.55***	17.52	H2: Supported
Attitude → Donation	0.24***	12.66	H3a: Supported
Attitude → Word-of-mouth	0.28***	15.09	H3b: Supported
Attitude → Volunteer	0.17***	8.00	H3c: Supported
Fit → Donation	0.35***	17.21
Fit → Word-of-mouth	0.38***	19.45
Fit → Volunteer	0.18***	8.18
Attitude x Fit → Donation	0.03*	1.95	H4a: Supported
Attitude x Fit → Word-of-mouth	0.02**	2.73	H4b: Supported
Attitude x Fit → Volunteer	0.05	0.87	H4c: Unsupported
Model Fit:
χ^2 = 997.15(83), p = 0.000 RMSEA = .05
CFI = .99
TLI = .98
SRMR = .04

***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Study 2

Data collection

Study 2 provides an understanding of how NPO managers navigate social partnership formation, implementation, and evaluation to achieve their goals. It aims to both confirm the approaches informed by previous research in different contexts, while allowing for emergent themes that may challenge these expectations. As such, in-depth interviews with NPO managers who were handling social partnerships with commercial organisations were deemed the best way to gather this insight, given in-depth interviews enable deeper exploration of respondent expertise and the ability to further probe and delve into responses (Creswell & Poth, 2016). We conducted 11 interviews with NPO managers who were partnering with professional sports organisations. There were three key criteria for participation: 1) the NPO had to be involved in an existing partnership with a professional sports team, 2) the interviewee had to be responsible for and oversee partnership development and associated activities, 3) the NPO had to be located in Australia. While potentially generalisable to other commercial organisations, narrowing the focus to professional sports organisations allows for future comparative work.

A semi-structured interview protocol was employed with a guide consisting of 30 initial questions addressing how managers approach the partnership stages – formation, implementation, and outcomes. Interview questions were adapted from the literature (Husted, 2003; Jamali & Keshishian, 2009; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009; Stadtler, 2018) and covered key topics including motives for partnership selection with a sports team, partnership selection, objective development, management, implementation of activities, best practice tools and evaluative mechanisms to measure social partnership effectiveness. The interview guide also allowed for the emergence of themes, both relating to and beyond the initial frame.

Once created, a pilot draft of the interview guide was evaluated for content validity to ensure the correctness of the interview guide relative to its purpose (Barriball & While, 1994). Elements like wording, order of questions, and the inclusion/exclusion of questions were scrutinised (Patton, 2015). Following this, a pilot interview with a participant that had a similar position to the interview participants was conducted for reliability purposes (Turner, 2010). Feedback from this confirmed that the interview guide was appropriate for further use.

Participants were initially invited to participate via email following either website investigation or referral. We approached 32 NPOs, but only nine agreed to participate in the study (see Table 3 for sample profile). Whilst the sample size was relatively low, there was confidence that information saturation had occurred, and this number of respondents provided an adequate cross-section of organisational size and social issue addressed. Therefore, we decided to cease interviews. All but one interview was conducted face-to-face on the NPO premises’, where they varied in length from approximately just under 1 to 1.5 hours.

Data analysis

The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim across 325 pages of text. To organise the dataset, transcripts were imported into Nvivo 12. Data analysis was broken into two steps. First, a coding frame was developed based on the different partnership stages. Here, data were read and then coded accordingly as these distinct stages present different challenges and opportunities for organisations (Selsky & Parker, 2005). Second, using axial coding, sub-categorical data properties were gathered for each initial category. Within this process, we grouped codes according to their thematic relatedness within each initial category. For instance, all the codes that captured power imbalance in the implementation stage were grouped together.

Results

Study 1

Table 4 shows the results of hypotheses testing. Except for one (H4c) hypothesis, all other theorised paths were supported. Respectively, the path from awareness to attitude was positive and significant (β = 0.73, p < 0.001), thus supporting H1. As predicted, this path was significantly moderated by NPO reputation (β = 0.55, p < 0.001), showing support for H2. Positive attitude formation was positive and significant with all hypothesised outcomes, including donation intention (β = 0.24, p < 0.001), advocacy intention (β = 0.28, p < 0.001) and volunteer intention (β = 0.17, p < 0.001), therefore, supporting H3a-c. Both donation (β = 0.03, p = 0.05) and advocacy intention (β = 0.02, p < 0.01) were moderated by perceived fit, however, volunteer intention was not (β = 0.05, p = 0.39), therefore H4a and H4b were supported, whilst H4c was unsupported.

As indicated, target audience members responded quite positively to NPOs involved in social partnerships. Firstly, results showed that consumers go through a hierarchy-of-effects sequence where a positive relationship from awareness to attitude to conation was shown. Target consumers showed an intent to donate, volunteer and advocate on behalf of the NPO resulting from their relationship with the partner organisation. This is favourable for NPOs who often look to partnerships to achieve marketing goals. The moderation analysis provided evidence that NPO reputation positively influenced attitudes towards the social partnership. Further, moderation also revealed a strengthening of the relationship between attitude and donation intention and attitude and advocacy intention as a result of perceived fit. Yet, perceived fit had no bearing on the relationship between attitude and volunteer intention.

This first study confirmed the importance of social partnerships for NPOs towards achieving desirable consumer outcomes. Having established this, the second study was designed to seek a better understanding of the stages of social partnership development that typically occur between NPOs and commercial organisations to achieve such outcomes. This was undertaken to provide insight to the robustness of current theory on stages of development formed in related, but different contexts, and also to reveal practical implications for NPO managers.

Study 2

Study 2 was conducted to get a better understanding of how NPO managers approached social partnership formation, implementation, and evaluation to achieve their goals, including marketing outcomes tied back to target consumer reactions, thereby specifically addressing the second area of enquiry – how do NPOs approach the different stages of the partnership and participate in decisions to achieve their goals? Specifically, to gather this information, questions were developed according to the different stages of the social partnership process. By understanding how NPO managers form and implement their social partnerships, we were able to get a broad understanding of social partnership effectiveness. Furthermore, gathering NPO management insight concerned with the measurement of outcomes reaffirmed what outcomes managers expected to achieve from their social partnerships and what mechanisms they had in place to measure such outcomes. After analysis, two key themes emerged – ‘level of business practice formality’ where managers oscillated between formal and informal processes and ‘power imbalance’ where managers did not exhibit a great deal of participation or reciprocity in decision-making with the sports team partner. These are further outlined below.

Business formality

Partnership formation:

As part of the partnership formation process, NPO managers were asked why they considered a partnership with a professional sports team. Predominantly for managers, motives were developed from commercial orientations with increasing visibility and funding seen as the driving force. Aligned with our expectations where we theorised that managers would have goal clarity when approaching a partnership, NPOs demonstrated a level of formality by recognising that a collaboration was required to assist them in achieving their mainly fiduciary goals:

It’s our responsibility and it’s our remit under the funding we receive from government to raise awareness of [NPO] and its services and one of the channels we can do that through is sport. (NPO 6 - Manager Corporate Partners and Fundraising)

Here, managers recognised visibility and funding objectives could be achieved by partnering with a high-profile organisation such as a professional sports team. However, a movement away from formality was present even in this formative stage as contrary to social partnership literature examined in different contexts and our expectations for the data, NPO managers demonstrated little evidence of problem identification that necessitated a partnership to resolve it, and what other major benefits could be drawn from a more integrated partnership. Further, as opposed to our initial expectations indicating that managers would look to potential cohesion with possible partners, the majority of NPO managers did not identify organisations based on partner cohesion, but rather, profile:

… we would love a relationship with a football club. And if we get it, then we would want to caress it, and manage it to the best of our ability, to keep a client for as long as we possibly could. (NPO 3 – Chief Executive Officer)

There was insufficient formal potential partner assessment during the formation stage in 9 of 11 cases, thereby contradicting our theorisation that managers would be deliberate in their partnership formation approach. This included any acknowledgement or attempt to look for a partner with a more integrated partnership-orientation from the outset. Instead, managers seemed satisfied that the partnering organisation was a sports team and therefore, skipped the formal stages of assessing compatibility, sports team motives and previous experience in engaging in collaborative efforts (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012; Jamali & Keshishian, 2009). Consequently, there were no set criteria in place when selecting partners. This manifested into some fairly complex situations, for example, two NPOs had the same sports team partner and one NPO had partnerships with two teams in the same league. Such an approach can cause confusion for target audiences and likely prevents a more integrated relationship among partners (Rayne et al., 2021).

Partnership implementation:

During this stage, several key best practice steps are advised. Namely, partner selection, development of roles and responsibilities, and outlining and implementing processes and operations. Results again showed there was movement between formal and informal business practice, partly contradicting our initial predictions. Specifically, we predicted that a purposeful approach would be taken when selecting partners, however, in most cases, informal business practice emerged where no specific selection process or criteria was used:

I don’t know whether we have a formal criteria. But certainly, I guess we look at the 60-minutes test, as we like to call it, or the front page of the local paper as to, you know, if a club is full of bad stories about alcohol and drugs and things like that, we would probably have to investigate further whether that would be a good partnership or not. (NPO 9 - Empowerment Programs Officer)

This flowed from the lack of formality present within the formation stage where a partnership with a sports team was identified as a means to achieving strategic objectives but lacked appropriate formalised assessment.

Once the selection of partners has taken place, formalised partnership processes and operations are implemented, however, managers in this study again vacillated between formal and informal business practice. Specifically, with partnership formalisation, most respondents discussed the importance of an MoU which was often cited as a best practice tool, matching our expectation. Although not all managers were able to obtain a formalised MoU. For those with formalised agreements, this enabled a review of successful and unsuccessful partnership activities which allowed for alterations to be made, speaking to a more developed and formalised process. However, counter to our assumptions, this was often offset by a more informal approach to business practice where MoUs were developed without appropriate articulation of individual organisation and collaborative objectives, activities, timelines, and budgets:

That you get as part of the partnership, and you have to work within the times that they can appear. (NPO 5 - General Manager)Yes, it was pretty much created by them, by the club, but our input was how – their thinking is, okay you’re going to have let’s say 20% of our charitable program is going to go to your charity. How can you best maximise that amount of time for your charity? (NPO 4 - General Manager)

Furthermore, interviews highlighted when developing partnership-related objectives, in most cases, these were ad-hoc and in other cases, were not really developed or formalised at all, contradicting our initial expectations:

And I suppose we don’t have a list of objectives. I suppose particularly with the [Sports Team] our objective is to get the [NPO] message out to as many [Sports Team] members, fans, supporters as possible and we use all of these different tools to do that. Does that make sense? (NPO 6 - Manager Corporate Partners and Fundraising)

Overall, the partnership implementation stage is grounded in formalisation, often with a signed agreement in place. However, the operationalisation of the partnership is mostly informal with scarce formalised and joint objective development and articulated activities to achieve partnership or individual NPO goals.

Partnership evaluation:

NPO managers selected a partnership with a sports team to achieve mainly instrumental outcomes – donations and visibility, thus supporting formality in business practice, and aligning with our assumptions that instrumental organisational outcomes were the primary focus of social partnerships. Whilst many of their activities tried to serve these motives, albeit in a mostly informal manner, understanding as to whether these were achieved or not presented some critical operational issues regarding outcome measurement. Of the 11 managers interviewed, 9 provided little to no evidence of measuring partnership outcomes or, adopting a very informal approach, thus casting doubt on the benefit of a partnership strategy:

Did the rest of the guys playing golf enjoy the day because of the connection with the players? Did they help us in terms of the auction, auctioning of the items and, so, yes? Probably feedback more than anything … Mmm, It’s all very informal. (NPO 4 – General Manager)

Rather, only two organisations actively measured outcome achievement, but even here, only a portion of partnership outputs were captured and were measured in fairly vague terms:

Yeah, sometimes we do. We haven’t actually done any measurement around how many [Sports Team] supporters in the last five years have come on and donated to us only because we haven’t watched databases and probably from a privacy perspective as well, we haven’t done that. But we know though that when we do a campaign with [Sports Team] how many go on and donate, so we can put dollars to that, but everything else we do out in market. We ask if they go online to donate how many donate because of face-to-face or if we call them or an activation? So, they may put down ‘[Sports Team]’ so we can see that. But we probably need to put some more rigour around it. (NPO 1 - General Manager Marketing and Communications)

Of all managers interviewed, the case above highlighted the most formal approach to outcome measurement, however, even in such a case this was general and related little to overarching goals and full scope of activities to achieve such goals. Despite managers indicating that donations and visibility were their principal motives for forming partnerships with a sports team, developing effectiveness measures concerning these were mostly absent, which is in contradiction to our prediction that at the very least, instrumental outcomes would be measured formally. Alarmingly, in two cases, managers indicated uncertainty regarding whether they measured any outcomes:

I probably wouldn’t be able to say on that one because we have numerous fundraising type things happening all the time. So, yeah, apart from when, say you have a [NPO] day and you’re asking people to donate … just in general I wouldn’t be able to say. (NPO 9 - Empowerment Programs Officer)

That’s right, externally it’s really hard, really hard for us to know or measure. (NPO 2 - Marketing Manager)

Power imbalance

Partnership formation:

Power imbalance as a result of resource dependency was present within this stage of the partnership where NPO managers looked to sports teams as potential partners due to their resource offerings. Specifically, for these managers, the ubiquity of sports within society, access to and idolisation of star players and exposure to large fanbases were the underlying drivers to partner with sports teams:

You know, if you’ve got somebody of note coming to your event, it’s a lot easier to get papers there and photographers and things like that, and that helps the awareness. Given that it’s a donation-driven charity, so it’s all about awareness. (NPO 4 – General Manager)

This is an issue at such an early stage of the partnership where shared value by way of complementarity of resources were not mentioned by any of the managers, thus managers did not take active steps to present the benefits they could offer potential partners, which countered our initial view. For example, we would expect NPO managers to mention their ability to address a genuine social issue, in conjunction with the ‘star power’ of a sports team to be used to create real social impact. Additionally, and counter to expectations, NPO managers made no reference to the development of collaborative boundaries to protect their interests within the partnership.

Further developed from issues around a power imbalance are perspectives of mistrust concerning the motives of sports teams choosing to partner with the NPO. Specifically, managers often identified the commercial motives underlying sports team partnership formation:

As well in that, when everything’s going badly on the field, or when your star footy player is up on drugs charges or whatever there’s a really beautiful positive story that’s also being fed by an external organisation to the media and it’s a chance to say something to your fans about, ‘Actually we’re doing really positive things in the community’. (NPO 8 - Communications Manager)

Here, most NPO managers simply believed that sports teams were doing this partly as an insurance policy against off-field malfeasance. This shows signs of power imbalance as NPO managers were still willing to partner with these professional sports teams, despite believing superficiality to be the sports team’s primary motivator.

Partnership implementation:

Given the power imbalance present in the formation stage, it is unsurprising this filtered to the partnership implementation stage. Despite our view to the contrary, 9 NPO managers indicated a power imbalance where managers mostly worked around the sports team rather than developing joint agreements collaboratively, thus excluding key mechanisms to build strong relational ties. A power imbalance was also evident in 5 instances where there was no formalised MoU with the sports teams as typically, this was at the behest of the sports team. Therefore, NPO managers did not formalise their agreements, despite recognising the benefits of doing so:

I don’t have real clarity as to why there’s been a lack of desire around that [developing an MoU]. I think sometimes there’s the nervousness of putting things in writing and committing to things. (NPO 8 - Communications Manager)

Despite the informal approach to objective development, most partnership activities fed into the overriding goals for forming a partnership with a sports team – visibility and fundraising. However, activities were often homogenous across the partnerships incorporating informal, or superficial activities including player appearances, barbecues, match-days, auctioning sporting memorabilia, and events (e.g. golf days). Here, signs of power imbalance were evident in two ways. First, managers often viewed the partnership as solid despite consisting of mostly cursory activities, thus not acknowledging the potential or shared value of the relationship. Second, 9 of the 11 managers were often told what programs they should implement rather than developing a joint plan of action, thus demonstrating a lack of participation in decision-making, and consequently, countering our predictions:

It’s pretty much the program was set out by the club. This is what they will do and then it’s more around us, how do we maximise that exposure? (NPO 4 – General Manager)

So, you know, making sure that we, you know, we’re still here, and is there anything that you need us to do? (NPO 3 – Chief Executive Officer)

Other managers expressed a degree of gratefulness, where the sports team was viewed as doing them a favour rather than co-creating value:

So they trust her and know her and know that she doesn’t ask for too much. She just … you know, we’re really careful about not asking too much. (NPO 2 - Marketing Manager)

NPO managers indicated how they took a flexible approach around the needs of the sports team. For example, the manager of NPO 8 highlighted how the sports team would develop activities, send appropriate dates, and expect the NPO to adapt to the demands of the team to achieve ‘minimum effort, for maximum exposure’. This exemplifies the power imbalance in social partnerships, however, counter to our initial expectations, NPO managers rarely acknowledged the power imbalance, and as such, did not incorporate appropriate mechanisms to overcome these imbalances.

Discussion

The current research explores whether social partnerships are an effective way for NPOs to achieve positive outcomes with a partner organisation’s existing customer base, and, if so, how NPOs approach the different stages of the partnership and participate in decisions to achieve their goals. Specifically, we set out to examine target audience reactions and NPO business practice concerning social partnerships, thus providing a holistic perspective of social partnership input and output. In doing so, we have answered the call by previous researchers requesting greater insight into this phenomenon (Harrison, 2019; Harrison et al., 2021) and make a theoretical contribution by extending on current social partnership literature, which has yet to make the link between NPO business practice input and consumer outcomes in a single study.

The first study hypothesised that sports team fans would go through an awareness-attitude-action sequence, demonstrating their support to the NPO partner via donation, word-of-mouth, and volunteering. In accord with the hierarchy-of-effects model, target audience members reacted favourably towards the NPO via an awareness-attitude-action sequence. Broadly, these findings demonstrate to NPO marketers that they should shift their prioritisation of social partnerships from a peripheral activity, and begin to realise that sincere, well-developed social partnerships can manifest into critical marketing outcomes. Therefore, it is advocated that NPO marketers address each stage (i.e. formation, implementation, and evaluation) of the social partnership with greater vigour and deliberation.

Furthermore, for NPO marketers, understanding that a hierarchy-of-effects sequence occurs could help to evaluate target audience behaviour generated from social partnership output. NPO marketing managers can therefore view whether social partnership programs and activities achieve strategic advantage and provide long-term benefits to the organisation and key stakeholders (Murray & Vogel, 1997). Further, the rigid hierarchy-of-effects process indicates the different touchpoints NPO marketers can use to reach target audience members. NPO marketers can consequently adapt their communication methods and frequency to stimulate certain stages of the sequence (Modi & Mishra, 2010). For example, by pooling resources, social partnership marketers could call on mass marketing tools to promote partnership awareness. This could be off-set or replaced with other, less costly communication strategies such as using digital influencers (Do Nascimento et al., 2020). Specifically related to the sports context, NPO marketers should attempt to leverage the communication channels of their sports team partner, given the team’s high-profile, passionate fan base, and access to mass media channels (Inoue et al., 2013). To create favourable attitudes among audiences to stimulate patronage, NPO marketers could use positive emotional appeals (Moore & Harris, 1996), or develop a storytelling narrative concerning the partnership and impact on clients and related stakeholders (Ganassali & Matysiewicz, 2021).

For further understanding into target audience reactions for NPOs stemming from the partnership, we hypothesised that NPO reputation would moderate the relationship between awareness and attitude. Results showed the awareness to attitude path was positively moderated by NPO reputation. This can be explained by the assertion that organisation reputation influences how consumers evaluate social partnerships (Harrison et al., 2021, 2022; Rim et al., 2016; Vafeiadis et al., 2021), whether a commercial firm or NPO. In accordance with Harrison et al. (2022), it is recommended that NPO managers ensure a positive reputation of their organisation is already well established before partnering with another organisation. Furthermore, for NPO marketers, building a good reputation may involve pushing their strong community contributions to wider audiences via digital media channels and annual reports (Hyndman & McConville, 2018).

Aligned with previous social partnership research (e.g. Harrison et al., 2022), we also hypothesised that perceived fit would moderate the relationship between social partnership attitude and the three related NPO directed outcomes – donation, word-of-mouth, and volunteering intent. Here, perceived fit moderated the relationship between social partnership attitude and donation and word-of-mouth intention, but not volunteer intention, thus partially contradicting our hypothesis and findings in previous studies (e.g. Bigné-Alcañiz et al., 2012; Vafeiadis et al., 2021). This last result can be explained by the significance of the motivation required to volunteer where willing participants may not assess fit when making this higher involvement decision. Future research is advocated to investigate this further. For NPOs, the perception of appropriate fit among target audiences is influential in their reactions to the NPO, thus it is suggested NPO marketers use communications to show the link between the NPO and partner organisation (Maktoufi et al., 2020). According to results in the qualitative study, fit was not a major consideration for NPOs when forming a social partnership with a sports team. Based on the findings of the quantitative study of this research, we suggest NPO managers consider strategic fit during the formation stage of social partnerships and when selecting a partner. This may mean developing more rigorous selection criteria when generating a pool of potential partners and selecting partners that present greater congruency.

Given the positive results gleaned from the quantitative study (Study 1), where target audience members showed a willingness to support the NPO by way of donations, volunteering, and advocacy as a result of their relationship with the partner organisation, qualitative research (Study 2) was conducted to explore how NPO managers approach the partnership process to further identify the link between business practice and consumer outcomes.

Going into this from past studies addressing effective social partnership practice, it was predicted that NPO managers would have systemised processes and procedures in place concerning social partnership formation and implementation. We also theorised that NPO managers, while not fully capturing all social and commercial outcomes associated with the social partnership, would at least evaluate instrumental organisational outcomes, including marketing outcomes such as target audience advocacy and donations.

Managers fluctuated from formal to informal business practice across the formation, implementation, and evaluation stages of the social partnership. Critically, contrasting our initial expectations, whilst there were MoUs in some cases, these lacked appropriate articulation of processes and practices, where formalised objectives were virtually absent, and activities narrow. Concerning social partnership outcomes, we proposed that organisations would take a deliberate approach to measuring particular organisational outcomes; however, this was not the case. Rather, outcome measurement lacked formal development and was subsequently insufficient or missing.

Further, results showed strong evidence of a power imbalance in the relationship whereby the NPOs were rarely involved in joint planning or decision-making and required flexibility to meet the requirements of the sports team, despite our prior predictions. Aligned with strategic management theory and social partnership literature, it is valuable for partnering organisations to integrate objectives, policies, and action sequences to achieve goals (e.g. donations, visibility, social impact) at both an individual and collaborative level (Clarke & Fuller, 2010), and to evaluate the attainment of objectives (van Tulder et al., 2016). Therefore, it is advocated that NPOs increase their agency in social partnership relationships. This may mean pursuing partners that are willing to adopt a more collaborative approach to social partnerships rather than treating the partnership peripherally. NPOs may want to include ‘willingness to engage and collaborate’ as part of their social partnership selection criteria.

Conclusion, limitations and future research

Overall, this research has contributed to the existing, yet limited literature addressing the NPO perspective to social partnerships. Specifically, we have provided important insights regarding the link between targeted audience reactions and NPO business practice. While social partnerships provide marketing managers the opportunity to achieve their instrumental outcomes, there is a disconnect in business practice where managers tend to approach partnerships with a lack of business formality and are often passive recipients of a power imbalance with their sports team partners. Therefore, we provide NPO marketing managers with greater insight into the importance of addressing their social partnerships with more strategic intent.

Like all studies, this study is beset by limitations. First, the research context was social partnerships between an NPO and professional sports team. Despite previous research drawing parallels between professional sports teams and commercial firms in social partnerships, typically, sports fans are more involved than commercial firm consumers and may react more favourably to the NPO than consumers associated with a commercial firm (Lacey & Kennett-Hensel, 2010). Second, at the behavioural level, target audience outcomes associated with social partnership participation were all measured using intentions compared to studying actual behaviour. While research has shown this as a strong reflection of behaviour (Morwitz et al., 2007), it does not comprehensively capture genuine conation. Third, the quantitative data did not control for people’s prior attitudes towards the NPO in the social partnership or NPOs in general, but rather the social partnership itself. Finally, methodologically, the quantitative study (Study 1) of this research is restrained by the limitations of cross-sectional research.

Possible future research lines worthy of investigation are derived from this study. First, this current study identified the moderating role of reputation and perceived fit as contextual factors that impact on targeted consumers’ reactions to social partnerships and NPOs involved in such partnerships. Building on this, future research should examine other contextual factors that are likely to impact consumer reactions towards the NPO. For example, what role does causal attribution play in shaping consumer perceptions of the NPO’s motives for engaging in a social partnership? Second, we identified that social partnership reactions among targeted audiences result in favourable supportive outcomes. Developing this, future research could extend our conceptual model by determining how consumers react to the NPO following the behavioural stage of the consumer process (e.g. engagement behaviour following donations). Finally, future research could broaden the link between consumer reactions and NPO business practice by providing various NPO stakeholder perspectives beyond that of NPO marketers. For example, research could incorporate interviews with NPO employees to examine the impact of positive targeted audience reactions towards the NPO on day-to-day operations or interactions with clients, other partners, or philanthropists.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Rayne

Daniel Rayne is a Lecturer of Marketing and early career researcher at RMIT University with marketing industry experience. His research focus is consumer behavior, predominantly related to digital engagement and social responsibility, including social partnerships. He has also done work in services and sports marketing. Daniel has published work in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Strategic Marketing and Journal of Business Research.

Simon Pervan

Simon Pervan is the Dean of the Graduate School of Business and Law, and is Professor of Marketing at RMIT University. He is an expert on service workers, advertising effectiveness and consumer behavior, scale development and professional doctoral programs. His research covers a range of areas including. Simon has published his work in journals including Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Marketing Letters, Education + Training and Studies in Continuing Education.

Heath McDonald

Heath McDonald is the Dean of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT and Professor of Marketing. Heath’s research focuses on customer acquisition and retention, particularly in subscription markets (e.g., season tickets, memberships). More recently, Heath has published work on CSR and social partnerships. His academic research work has been published in leading journals in the fields of Marketing, Sport Management and Hospitality. He consults widely to industry, and his work is currently funded by more than 20 industry partners. This work was funded through Australian Research Council Grant LP100100222.

Civilai Leckie

Civilai Leckie is an Associate Professor at Swinburne University of Technology and has experience working at various universities in Australia and in the market research industry. Her research is in the areas of relationship marketing, market orientation, consumer behavior, services marketing and business-to-business relationships. Civilai’s work has been published in leading journals including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Sports Management, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Journal of Business Research.