Journal of Marketing | 2021
EXPRESS: Leveraging Creativity in Charity Marketing: The Impact of Engaging in Creative Activities on Subsequent Donation Behavior
Abstract
Charities are constantly looking for new and more effective ways to engage potential donors in order to secure the resources needed to deliver their services. The current work demonstrates that creative activities are one way for marketers to meet this challenge. A set of field and lab studies show that engaging potential donors in creative activities positively influences their donation behaviors (i.e., the likelihood of donation and the monetary amount donated). Importantly, the observed effects are shown to be context independent: they hold even when potential donors engage in creative activities unrelated to the focal cause of the charity (or the charitable organization itself). The findings suggest that engaging in a creative activity enhances the felt autonomy of the participant, thus inducing a positive affective state, which in turn leads to higher donation behaviors. Positive affect is shown to enhance donation behaviors due to perceptions of donation impact and a desire for mood maintenance. However, the identified effects emerge only when one engages in a creative activity—not when the activity is non-creative, or when only the concept of creativity itself is made salient.