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A Spoonful of Sugar: Harnessing Fun to Increase Charitable Donations
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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SSHRC IDG awarded 2019: Donation research has typically focused on using negativity, such as negative emotions of sadness, fear, or guilt, to motivate donation behaviour. However, recent reports indicate that such use of negativity to solicit donations has upset many donors who felt manipulated. In contrast, charity events using positivity like fun have been gaining public interest. The Ice Bucket Challenge, where one dumps a bucket of ice water over one’s head, was a massive success, raising over $100 million for ALS research. Yet, little academic research has focused on using positivity to encourage donations. Thus, using the donation context, we propose to investigate the effect of positivity in the form of fun. We argue that harnessing fun in charitable fundraising events should lead to positive outcomes for both charities and donors, by way of increasing donations and improving donors’ well-being. We focus on fun because, despite its ubiquity and potency in business, education, and the workplace, the concept of fun is not well understood in the marketing literature. Our synthesis of the literature has revealed that, in general, an experience is fun when it leads to positive, moderately to highly arousing emotions (e.g., excitement) with low consequences. Fun tends to increase with more of these components; however, excessive arousal or consequences, which often lead to anxiety, are likely to be detrimental to fun. Based on our conceptual framework of fun, we propose to run lab and field experiments to demonstrate that those who experience more fun in charity events are more likely to display increases in donation behaviour because more fun elicits a stronger approach, motivation and greater engagement. We will also show that anticipated fun (i.e., imagining and predicting the experience of fun) behaves similarly to experienced fun because they are conceptually similar. Further, we will identify and test social elements (e.g., more participants and/or audience members; more cooperation and/or recognition) as a factor that can increase the experience or anticipation of fun, thus increasing subsequent donation behaviour. This is because social elements should increase positive emotions and arousal, which enhances fun. Finally, we will explore the gravity or seriousness of a cause as a circumstance under which fun may not increase and may decrease donations, due to people’s reluctance to reduce a grave cause into something as ordinary or trivial as fun.
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- Date created
- 2019-02-01
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- Type of Item
- Research Material
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- License
- ©️Moore, Sarah. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2023.