Sadness or Inspiration? Examining the Interactive Effects of Temperature and Donation Appeal on Charitable Giving

• Main Authors: Li, Yu-Fan, 李雨帆
• Other Authors: Chang, Chia-Chi
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5hfwsd

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理科學系所 === 106 === People have different behavioral patterns, ways of thinking, and psychological mechanisms at different temperatures. For charities, it’s important to design different donation appeals in different temperature to make sure that people would take time to feel the sufferings of a disadvantaged group and would be more sympathetic. Therefore, this paper will explore how charities should design donation advertisements to attract people’s willingness to donate money and improve actual donation. This study designed a 2x2 experiment to analyze whether sadness-dominating message and inspiration-dominating (sadness + strength) message will affect the amount of donations at different temperatures. The results show that in the warm circumstance, people contributed more money after reading sadness-dominating messages; while in the cold circumstance, donations after reading inspiration-dominating message were higher. According to the conclusion of this study, for charities, in the cold seasons, elements of “inspiration” can be added to the donation appeal to reflect the self-improvement of the victims, showing their strength and determination. In the warm seasons, donation appeals should describe more about victims’ miserable situation, using sad emotion to trigger people’s sympathy to increase the amount of donations. This research will provide advice to charities for designing persuasive donation appeals at different temperatures.