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The objectives of this study are threefold: to delineate the phenomenon of “You Share, We Donate” (YSWD) campaigns and what distinguishes them from sales-based cause-related marketing; to contrast the effectiveness of YSWD and sales-based cause-related marketing campaigns and provide an explanation for the differences in the effectiveness; to explore boundary conditions of the proposed differences.

Three experiments were conducted to empirically test the differential effect of campaign formats (i.e. YSWD vs sales-based cause-related marketing), the underlying mechanism and structural as well as contextual features moderating the differential effect.

The findings suggest that YSWD messages elicit consumers’ message-sharing intentions more than traditional cause-related marketing messages. The effect is explained by consumers’ sense of empowerment and can be enhanced through donation cap non-specification. The findings further indicate that YSWD campaigns are especially fruitful in low power distance cultures.

This study contributes toward corporate donation campaign literature by focusing on the usage of social media.

From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

This paper extends cause-related marketing literature by not only introducing the phenomenon of YSWD campaigns to the literature but also exploring strategies to enhance the effectiveness of such campaigns and shedding light on an outcome beyond the sales impact of cause-related marketing campaigns, i.e. an increase of visibility in social media. From a managerial perspective, this research provides marketers with guidelines on how to choose between the two cause-related marketing campaign formats and how to enhance the effectiveness of YSWD campaigns.

Whenever social injustice tackled by social movements receives heightened media attention, charitable crowdfunding platforms offer an opportunity to proactively advocate for equality by donating money to affected people. This research examines how the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated social protest cycle after the death of George Floyd have influenced donation behavior for campaigns with a personal goal and those with a societal goal supporting the black community.

This paper follows a quantitative research approach by applying a quasi-experimental research design on a GoFundMe dataset. In total, 67,905 campaigns and 1,362,499 individual donations were analyzed.

We uncover a rise in donations for campaigns supporting the black community, which lasts substantially longer for campaigns with a societal than with a personal funding goal. Informed by construal level theory, we attribute this heterogeneity to changes in the level of abstractness of the problems that social movements aim to tackle.

This research advances the knowledge of individual donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding. Our results highlight the important role that charitable crowdfunding campaigns play in promoting social justice and anti-discrimination as part of social protest cycles.

This study aims to explore the reasons why some Chinese private entrepreneurs are reluctant to make charitable donations, with a focus on the perspective of “original sin” suspicion. The objective of this paper is to examine the challenges faced by these entrepreneurs, especially those suspected of “original sin,” when making charitable donations, and to provide recommendations for addressing these challenges.

Using data from the Chinese Private Enterprises Survey Database for the years 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014, this study used ordinary least squares regression to examine the relationship between “original sin” suspicion and charitable donations from private enterprises.

This study examined the impact of “original sin” suspicion on charitable donations and found that it significantly reduces the donations of privatized enterprises. The negative impact of “original sin” suspicion on charitable donations is especially pronounced in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as those that have experienced changes in local leadership.

While previous research focused on the motivations of private enterprises that donated, they failed to identify which types of enterprises were reluctant to donate and why. By focusing on the “original sin” suspicion surrounding entrepreneurs in privatized enterprises and the political costs they face, this study sheds light on the challenges they encounter in charitable donations and explains why privatized enterprises, especially SMEs, are unwilling to make charitable donations.

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.

Circumstances such as pandemics can cause individuals to fall into a state of need, so they turn to donation services for assistance. However, donation services can be designed based on supply-side considerations, e.g. efficiency or inventory control, which restrict consumer choice without necessarily considering how consumer vulnerabilities like low financial or interpersonal power might cause them to react to such restrictions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine service designs that limit the choices consumers are given in terms of either the allowable quantity or assortment variety and examine effects on consumer perceptions of justice and satisfaction.

Three experiments are reported, including one manipulating the service design of an actual food pantry.

When consumers have low financial or interpersonal power, meaning their initial state of control is low, and they encounter a donation service that provides limited (vs. expanded) choice that drops control even lower, they perceive the situation as unjust and report lower satisfaction.

Donation service providers should strive to design services that allow for expanded consumer choice and use interpersonal processes that empower beneficiaries so they perceive the service experience as just and satisfying. Collecting feedback from beneficiaries is also recommended.

While researchers have started to look at the service experiences of vulnerable populations, they have focused primarily on financial service designs. The authors look at donation service designs and identify problems with supply-side limits to choice quantity and assortment.

Corporate donation behavior sends two financial-related signals, i.e. sufficient cash flow and self-confidence in future earnings. This paper aims to investigate whether these financial-related signals released by corporate donation drive investors to make more optimistic forecasts about the firm’s future earnings per share (EPS) and whether this effect varies across different historical earnings trends.

This study is based on a controlled online experiment with 553 MBA students.

The results demonstrate that a financial signaling mechanism works, but it is moderated by historical earnings trends. When the earnings trend is always increasing, the more the number of financial signals received, the higher the investors’ EPS forecast; when the earnings trend is fluctuating (down then up or up then down), investors’ EPS forecast is higher when they receive financial signal(s) than when they do not, but no additive effect occurs from receiving one signal to two signals; when the earnings trend is always decreasing, investors’ EPS forecast is irrelevant to the number of financial signals received.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to experimentally investigate a possible mechanism to explain investors’ positive response to corporate social responsibility (CSR) (specifically, corporate donation) disclosures – the financial signaling mechanism. This study also extends the research on the impact of financial information on investors’ use of nonfinancial information by investigating the moderating role of historical earnings trends on the financial signaling mechanism of the CSR effect.

Beneficiary photos on charity appeals are believed to engender prosocial behavior. This study explores photo framing of healthy and unhealthy beneficiary photos in the context of photo-rich online medical crowdfunding. Based on framing theory, emphasis framing effect (i.e. unhealthy photos only vs both healthy and unhealthy photos) and equivalency framing effect (i.e. healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos vs unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos) are identified.

A scenario-based experiment with 135 participants was used to empirically test the proposed research hypotheses. The subjects were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, with 45 subjects in each group. ANOVA, linear regression, and multiple mediation analysis were used to analysis data.

The results reveal that disclosing both healthy and unhealthy photos can elicit stronger sympathy and perceived need than merely disclosing unhealthy photos. Moreover, the order of unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos leads to a higher level of sympathy than the order of healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos. Furthermore, sympathy and perceived need are positively related to donation intention.

First, this study extends the photo-related research limited to certain characteristics of a single photo to the sequence effect of multiple photos. Second, this study contributes to framing theory by introducing photo framing, particularly the equivalence and emphasis framing effect of beneficiary photos. Finally, this study reveals the emotional and cognitive routes through which beneficiary photos stimulate prosocial behavior. It also offers practical guidance in the aspects of the framing effect of beneficiary photos for crowdfunding management.

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are exposed to a highly competitive environment in which they are forced to grow their commercial activity to acquire additional financial resources. This study aims to create an understanding of how NPOs involved in textile reuse as a revenue-generating programme manage their reverse supply chains (RSC).

The research involves an embedded single-case study of NPOs in Finland involved in post-use textile collection. The main data sources are semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

This study is inspired by the microfoundations movement and identifies the underlying microfoundations of the NPOs’ capabilities for managing RSC for textile reuse. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating NPOs’ lower-level, granular practices and their adaptations for achieving quality outcomes in textile reuse.

The findings have context sensitivity and apply to the NPOs which operate in a context similar to Finland, such as in other Nordic countries.

This study continues the discussion on the adoption of “business-like” practices in the NPOs’ pursuit of additional revenue streams to finance humanitarian work. The findings of this study can also be transferred to the growing area of domestic textile circularity.

Using the case of NPOs in textile reuse, the study illustrates how RSC management can serve a social, non-profit cause and transform unwanted textile products into a source of fundraising for humanitarian work.

This enriches the understanding of NPOs’ practices within the scope of revenue-generating programmes by examining one of them – textile reuse through charity shops from an RSC perspective.

This study aims to investigate the perspective of corporate philanthropy during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China for firms with various levels of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Specifically, the study appraises the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stock returns and sustainable development of Chinese-listed companies and determines the likelihood of paying donations vis-à-vis firm reputation.

The study used data from 117 Chinese-listed firms engaged in philanthropy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors also utilized the stock returns and cash donation data, and owing to the cross-sectional data and continuous nature of dependent variables, they employed the ordinary least squares regression to test the research hypotheses.

The results show that irresponsible actions have a positive relationship with donations. The study particularly reveals that irresponsible firms have significant negative abnormal returns during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to explore the perspective of corporate philanthropy during the COVID-19 pandemic for companies with different CSR levels. This study contributes to the empirical research on CSR and provides insights for managerial-cum-financial decisions to encourage managers of irresponsible firms to pursue philanthropic behaviors after crisis events.

This study aims to understand consumers' reactions to hospitality corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns under different resource scarcity reminders, an important but overlooked contextual factor, and examine how such scarcity reminders interact with message framing, a widely used technique in CSR communication.

Three experimental studies were conducted. Studies 1 and 2 examined the main effect of resource scarcity reminders (environmental vs personal) on consumer engagement via self-other orientation. Study 3 further investigated the interactive effect between resource scarcity reminders (environmental vs personal) and message framing (gain vs loss) with hope as a key mediator.

Studies 1 and 2 show that environmental (vs personal) scarcity activates a more salient other orientation, subsequently increasing consumers' donation and word-of-mouth intentions. Study 3 reveals that environmental (vs personal) scarcity makes people more hopeful with gain-framed messages. Moreover, the elevated hope enhances perceived efficacy (attitude toward the company), leading to higher donation (word-of-mouth) intention.

Hospitality marketers could remind consumers of the harsh environment to elicit other orientation and encourage CSR participation. Using gain-framed messages or other hope-inducing appeals would be particularly advantageous in engaging consumers in CSR campaigns during heightened environmental scarcity.

Focusing on consumer responses to CSR campaigns, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to reveal reminders of resource scarcity as a novel antecedent factor and further uncover how such reminders interact with message framing to affect CSR engagement.