Charity Marketing

Contemporary Issues, Research and Practice

Fran Hyde, Sarah-Louise Mitchell, Fran Hyde, Sarah-Louise Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organizzazioni non profit e di beneficenza
• Index: Business

Charities operate within an increasingly challenging environment, with competition for public engagement, funding and volunteers intensifying. High-profile scandals have knocked public trust and the recent Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated how important it is for charities to provide support in times of need and fill the gap left by inadequate public sector provision. Across 12 chapters a diverse group of academics and deep-thinking practitioners present contrasting perspectives and the latest thinking on the challenges within the charity sector.

The approach of the book contributes to the growing phenomenon of Theory + Practice in Marketing (TPM) presenting different perspectives and theoretical lenses to stimulate debate and future research.

Charity Marketing provides a bridge between the practice of contemporary nonprofit organisations, charity marketing and recent academic insight into the charity sector. Using exemplar case studies of nonprofit and charity brands, this edited volume will be of direct interest to students, academics, marketing practitioners and researchers studying and working in charities, public and nonprofit management, and marketing.

1

Charity marketing and corporate social responsibility

Walter Wymer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134169-4

Overview

Charity marketing activities and tactics are ultimately aimed at attracting (and retaining) support for a charity so that the charity can further its mission (Faulkner & Romaniuk, 2019). Charities receive support from individual donors and volunteers. Charities also receive support as grant recipients from government agencies and foundations. A growing source of support comes from the business sector. Charities may view donations and other forms of business support as a new source of revenue which can be valuable in offsetting government funding reductions or in funding new programmes (Himmelstein, 1997).

Just as charities are increasingly interested in learning more about how to better market to businesses to attract their support, business’s interest in supporting charities is also growing (von Schunurbein et al., 2016). Supporting charities is one way in which a business can demonstrate its corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR refers to ways in which businesses demonstrate to society that they are interested in being a positive influence in the world and not solely concerned with their own interests (Dahlsrud, 2008; Weeden, 1998).

How do charities attract and retain business/commercial support?

Charity marketing activities directed at attracting support from the business sector need to be adapted to the needs and motivations of the potential business supporter. After the business support has been cultivated, the relationship between the charity and business must be maintained in order to retain the business support (Sagawa & Segal, 2000).

A brand orientation and brand management culture in the charity is particularly efficacious in helping the charity to be an attractive organisation that businesses want to support (Wymer et al., 2015). Increasing brand remarkability – that is, acquiring a reputation for being an excellently managed and exceptional charity – is fundamental. Communicating that brand remarkability to stakeholder groups on a regular basis increases brand familiarity; that is, the level of knowledge target audiences have about the charity. As brand remarkability and brand familiarity increase over time, the charity as a brand gets stronger. As the brand gets stronger, more businesses want to support the charity (Wymer & Casidy, 2019; Wymer et al., 2016).

As the charity becomes more widely known as an exceptional organisation, the charity’s marketing efforts can be directed at targeting, or identifying businesses likely to respond positively to the charity’s donor cultivation efforts. Identifying a potential business supporter begins with looking for potential partners that appear to be a good fit for a relationship or alliance (Wymer & Samu, 2003). Mission fit, or a fit between the charity’s mission and business’s operations, might indicate a good match. Target market fit, or a similarity between those helped by a charity and a business’s customers, might also indicate a good match (Austin, 2000; Drumwright et al., 2000; Sagawa & Segal, 2000).

Appropriate selection of a business supporter is not the only prerequisite for a good charity relationship with a business donor/supporter. It is essential that the charity and business supporter are clear and open about their expectations from the relationship. Take, for example, the charity partnership between Breast Cancer Care and Marks & Spencer (M&S). Breast Cancer Care’s clients often had difficulty in finding appropriate bras after having a mastectomy. M&S partnered with Breast Cancer Care and created bras specifically for women who had been through breast cancer (Gilbert, 2019). Clearly communicating expectations about how the relationship will proceed, desired outcomes, and each partner’s responsibilities will guide the formation of the most useful type of supportive relationship. Some businesses may desire their support in the form of discrete events. Other businesses might want more enduring relationships (Wymer & Samu, 2003). Forming the type of relationship that helps charity and business supporter meet their expectations provides a strong foundation for a successful relationship. The typical charity–business relationships will be discussed later in the chapter.

Cultivating business/corporate support is akin to traditional donor cultivation activities. Once potential business supporters have been identified, charity marketing activities should focus on informing prospective businesses about the charity and its work. Introducing business owners/managers to the charity’s leadership, key staff, board members and key donors can also be helpful. Bringing prospective business supporters to the charity for a site visit can make more tangible the important work of the charity. The guiding principle in the early phase of donor cultivation is to make the prospective business partner more familiar with the charity and to emphasise the good work of the charity.

After the prospective business supporter becomes more familiar with the charity, the foot-in-the-door technique can be useful in attaining an initial modest level of support. The executive could be asked for advice on a managerial issue faced by the charity. The business owner could be asked to help sponsor an event. The goal in this phase of donor cultivation is to gain compliance for an initial modest level of support. Managers should not be made to feel like only their money is wanted by the charity. The charity should seek to build a relationship with the business in which the business’s investment in the charity’s mission is sought (Harrow et al., 2011; Leonhardt, 2011; Wymer et al., 2006).

Retaining a business’s support once it has been acquired requires purposeful relationship marketing activities from the charity. This will require a long-term approach to relationship cultivation and management through regular communication and engagement (Polivy, 2013; Waters, 2009a, 2009b). One way for charities to strengthen their corporate relationships is through enhancing corporate employee involvement. Microsoft’s CSR programme includes a volunteer grant programme. Microsoft donates $25 per hour for each hour one of its employees’ volunteers for a charity. The donation goes to the charity in which the employee volunteered. ExxonMobil has an employee matching gift programme as part of its CSR activities. The corporation donates up to $3 for each $1 employee donation to a charity, up to a specified limit.

Implications of CSR on charity marketing to individual donors

Corporations are increasingly demonstrating their commitment to CSR through community or social philanthropy programmes (Sasse & Trahan, 2007). Not a great deal is known, however, about the effects of corporate donations to a charity on the donation behaviours of individuals to those recipient charities. This is an important issue. For many charities, individual donors account for most donations (compared to grants or corporate donations) (Chaudhry & Heiss, 2020; Giving USA, 2019). Hence, the effects on individual donations from corporate support could have important consequences for charities. This is especially true given the potential threat of corporations withdrawing their support in the future (Himmelstein, 1997).

Paljug (2018) supports donations from corporate philanthropy as an effective means of showing a corporation’s commitment to a charity. Matunhu (2011) argues that corporate philanthropy has a negative effect on a charity’s ability to attract individual donations. Reid (2016) argues, however, that corporate support for charities enhances those charities’ ability to attract individual donations. Corporations often publicise their charitable giving to realise public relations benefits from their philanthropy. Corporate public relations communications to audiences to inform them of the corporations’ good works also has the effect of promoting the recipient charities. Hence, those charities become better known to the public. Those charities’ brand familiarity increases. Charities that are better known to the public are more likely than relatively lesser known charities to receive favourable responses in fundraising campaigns (Wymer & Akbar, 2019; Wymer et al., 2020).

Another argument for a positive influence of corporate donations on individual donations is that publicised corporate donations to a charity are essentially an endorsement of the charity (Finley et al., 2020). By its philanthropy, a company is vouching for the importance and worthiness of the charity. According to this argument, the corporate donation acts like an endorsement, which has a positive influence on individuals’ attitudes toward the recipient charity as well as a positive influence on the recipient charity’s trustworthiness (Randle et al., 2019).

Those who suspect corporate charitable donations have a negative effect on individual donations argue that when individuals learn of the large sums a corporation donates to their charity, their individual donations, by comparison, seem paltry. The perceived lower magnitude of their individual donations concomitantly lowers the perceived intrinsic rewards individual donors may experience. Hence, individual donors are less motivated to give to charities that receive corporate donations (Wymer et al., 2014).

Implications of CSR on charity reputation

There has been some research on the effects of corporate charitable donations on the donating corporation’s reputation (Hogarth et al., 2018; Xia et al., 2019), but little is known about the influence of corporate donations on the charity’s reputation. One longstanding concern about the potential negative influence of corporate donations on a charity’s reputation occurs in the wake of a scandal involving the corporate donor (Himmelstein, 1997). For example, when Volkswagen was involved in a scandal in 2015, we know little about the effects on the reputations of charities it supported like the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial (Cohen, 2015).

A charity should carefully consider accepting corporate support from a corporation wishing to use its support to repair its reputation, which is a popular strategy for reputation repair (Peterson, 2018; Wu et al., 2020). A charity that associates or collaborates with a disreputation corporation risks sullying its own reputation (Bergkvist & Zhou, 2019). Since a charity’s ability to attract donations is influenced by its reputation (Crettez et al., 2020; Wymer et al., 2020), it is unwise to make a decision which would result in the worsening of a charity’s reputation.

Another way in which a charity’s association with a corporate supporter can weaken the charity’s reputation occurs with there is a mission misfit between the two organisations. A mission misfit might exist when the corporation’s operations seem oppositional to the charity’s purpose. An extreme example might exist when an oil company donates to an environmental organisation, or a tobacco company donates to a cancer-prevention organisation. Another factor to consider is the degree to ...