Charity campaigns with promotion-framed goals are more effective than those with prevention-framed goals

Abstract

Proper communication with the public is crucial for encouraging private donors to make financial and non-financial donations to charities. This study compared the effectiveness of an advertising campaign that used a prevention framing for the charity’s purpose and one that used a promotional framing. This experimental study was conducted online with 547 participants. The results showed that the advertising message highlighting the promotional goals of the campaign was more effective than the one based on prevention goals. This result was observed not only for the evaluation of the campaign and organization as well as behavioral intentions, but, crucially, also on the level of actual behavior.