تصویر ذهنی از برند غیرانتفاعی و تأثیرات شاخصیت بر کمکهای خیریه

This research examines the influence of nonprofit brand image and typicality on giving behaviors. To this end, the researchers create a scale to measure the brand image of charities. Four dimensions of nonprofit brands emerge in the new scale: usefulness, efficiency, affect and dynamism. Brand image explains up to 31% of intentions to give money and 24% of intentions to give time. The study also explores the role of typicality in giving behaviors. Typicality explains up to 29% of intentions to give money and 23% of intentions to give time. The theoretical contributions, in addition to the comprehensive scale, include the significant role that brand image and typicality play in affecting donation behaviors. The paper concludes with managerial implications and limitations of the study.

In December 2004, the world watched in horror as a tsunami hit Asian coasts. Spontaneously, many people from around the world wished to make donations to help the affected populations. In a rush, most of these donors turned to traditional, well-known associations involved in humanitarian aid. The statistics show that the associations that collected the most donations after the 2004 tsunami disaster closely matches those with the highest rates of spontaneous recognition (Appendix 1). While this correlation shows that donors trusted the best-known charities, it also raises the question as to whether a good image or perceptions of being truly “typical” of humanitarian aid can fully explain the high correlation between donating and spontaneous recognition. Given the importance of fundraising in the nonprofit sector and of understanding the role of branding in donor behavior more clearly, this research has two objectives: first, it aims to identify the components of nonprofit brand image and develop a specific scale. With the exception of (Bennett and Gabriel, 2003), to date, there is only one scale developed to measure nonprofit brand image. Predominantly inspired by business practices, this scale does not adequately reflect the characteristics of the nonprofit world, thus making it necessary to create a new tool more suitable for nonprofit brands. This necessity is also articulated by Bennett and Sargeant (2005, p. 800) who called for “measuring the images, identities and reputations of nonprofit organizations and, of course, the development of new instruments specially constructed for the nonprofit sector”. In keeping with this, the second objective of the paper is to test the influence of nonprofit brand image and typicality on intentions to donate (time or money).

4.1. Theoretical implications The key contribution of this study is the creation of a scale for nonprofit brand image and its validation for five different organizations. The dimensions proposed in this study are quite similar to the brand image factors developed by Bennett and Gabriel (2003), since five out of fifteen items are the same. However, the two scales are different on three points. First, this study differentiates between the dimensions of usefulness and efficiency that were previously combined under the concept of reputation by Bennett and Gabriel (2003). Secondly, the dimensions of idealism and political orientation have disappeared after several statistical analyses. This may be because donors do not generally use these dimensions to describe the charities. Thirdly, our scale clearly shows a significant affective dimension in the image of the charities, contrary to the scale of Bennett and Gabriel (2003). A second contribution of this study is the emerging role of brand image in donor intention. The results show that nonprofit brand image correlates strongly with intention to give time or money. These findings converge with those of Venable et al. (2005) since nonprofit brand personality explains about 30–40% of intentions to give. On the other hand, they differ from those of Bennett and Gabriel, 2003, Sargeant et al., 2008a and Sargeant et al., 2008b. This maybe because Bennett and Gabriel (2003) worked with a small sample composed exclusively of young people. As for Sargeant et al., 2008a and Sargeant et al., 2008b, they clearly demonstrated that certain brand personality factors could not explain donor behaviors and the only explanatory dimension was emotion. Our study shows that there is a significant link between the four dimensions of brand image and the various facets of donor intention. More specifically, the affect dimension explains the intention to give time better than the intention to give money. In contrast, the efficiency dimension of the nonprofit brand explains the intention to give money better than the intention to give time. These results therefore extend those of Sargeant et al., 2008a and Sargeant et al., 2008b concerning the importance of affect in donor behavior. While affect explains the intention to give to a nonprofit, it exerts a greater influence on the decision to give time rather than money. Regarding the influence of the dimensions usefulness and dynamism, the results of this study show that these variables influence significantly the intention to give to nonprofit organizations, but are less powerful than affect and efficiency and have the same impact on for intentions to give time and to give money. Concerning the typicality of the nonprofit organization in the field of humanitarian aid, this variable strongly influences intentions to give both money and time. High typicality means that individuals perceive the nonprofit organization as representative of the sector. In other words, in order to explain the intention to give, the coherency and relevance of the nonprofit organization's brand image compared with the individual's representation of humanitarian aid is important. These results converge with the work of Rosch (1978) on the categorization process and the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1988). 4.2. Managerial implications This study reveals four important managerial implications. First, all nonprofits can use the developed scale in their examination of the donors, studies of volunteers and employees, or in their broader brand image research. They can use it, in particular, to situate the nonprofit's image in relation to competitors within a brand positioning approach. Measuring image each year would enable the organization to identify the influence of its communications campaigns and track the evolutions in its image over time. For example, a nonprofit could identify the influence of a celebrity spokesperson, public speaking event, or a new billboard campaign. The scale can be used either for face-to-face interviews or for self-administered questionnaires and thus enables the nonprofits to appropriate and incorporate it in their mailings or websites. Discussions with fundraising professionals reveal that they are very interested in accurately measuring their brand image, but do not have enough finances to purchase studies from survey companies. This scale provides a useful alternative for costly data acquisition. Second, of the five organizations studied, several have weak scores for affect while scoring high on confidence, which can be found here in the dimensions of usefulness and efficiency. They seem to have devoted less effort to the emotional dimension of their link with donors. Ewing and Napoli (2005) recommend that nonprofit organizations manage their brand through three dimensions: interaction (i.e. create a dialog with stakeholders), orchestration (i.e. communicate the same image to internal and external stakeholders) and affect (i.e. develop detailed knowledge of what the stakeholders like or dislike about the brand). The authors agree that charities have to understand how to create emotions linked to their brand, especially when trying to attract more volunteers. Third, this research demonstrates the important influence of perceived efficiency on donor behavior. It is, therefore, vital that nonprofits communicate on the efficiency of their organizations by publishing their accounts and mailing them to donors, organizing open house days, and providing an idea of donation equivalencies (e.g. one dollar can feed a child for one week). This confirms the importance of donor feedback as recently demonstrated by Merchant et al. (2010). Fourth, the findings show that nonprofits need to be perceived as typical of their cause in order to attract donations of time and money. Organizations should be careful to differentiate their marketing strategies from those of commercial brands and remain typical of humanitarian causes in their advertising. For example, UNICEF launched a brand of orange juice in the French market, the proceeds of which were intended for the organization. However, the campaign failed miserably because consumers considered the UNICEF brand as completely atypical in the orange juice market. Similarly, several nonprofit organizations have observed that when their mailings were too colorful, donors were less generous in giving. A survey showed that they viewed these mailings as too commercial and not typical of the charitable organizations (source: confidential study of the biggest French non-profit organization fighting against aids, AIDES). 4.3. Limitations and further research This study used donor intention data but future research must go beyond the declarative stage and measure real giving behavior. Also, since the sample consisted of nonprofit brands essentially involved in humanitarian aid in France, it is important to verify these findings for other nonprofit organizations and in other countries and cultures. In order to reveal the brand equity of a charity, it would be interesting to perform other experiments (e.g. well-known brand vs. lesser-known brand) to identify the differences in donor assessments and intentions according to whether a cause is sponsored by a recognized brand or not. This study does not deal with the question of brand territory. Future research could also help define brand territory and the potential for brand extension. Such a study could clearly identify the link between a charity brand and a corporate brand in case of their mutual partnership. Although studies have examined the influence of fit between nonprofit causes and commercial brands on the purchase of co-branded products (Pracejus and Olsen, 2004 and Samu and Wymer, 2009), there is no research on the territories of shared or complementary brands. A multiple regression of brand image and typicality explains 34% of intentions to donate money and 29% of intentions to donate time, raising questions about the other explanatory factors behind donor intentions. As Cermak et al. (1994) point out in the case of major donors, donations can be explained by a wide range of behaviors such as conformity with family wishes, desire to help an organization that has provided aid in the past, joining the organization's social network and meeting new friends, or local expansion of the nonprofit. Similarly, Sargeant et al. (2006) use a model to show that family utility, emotional utility and the quality of the nonprofit's communication campaign have an impact on donations. All these factors certainly account for a substantial share of variance that is not explainable by image and typicality and constitute useful avenues for future research.