Feature a Benefactor or a Victim? How Charity Appeals with Different Protagonist Foci Affect Donation Behavior

Charities often emphasize victims’ plight in their appeals (e.g., an emaciated, hunger-stricken child featured in UNICEF’s ads) and extensive donation research focuses on studying victim appeals. However, victim appeals have their limitations. Factors such as donors’ emotional exhaustion (Ein-Gar and Levontin 2013) or donors’ perceptions of justice (Lee, Winterich, and Ross 2014) tend to weaken the effectiveness of victim appeals. Crucially, when charity recipients are out-group members, even charity appeals featuring an identified victim lose their effectiveness (e.g., Kogut and Ritov 2007). In this paper, therefore, we consider featuring an alternative protagonist in the charity appeal, especially when soliciting donations for out-group members. Instead of a distressed victim, a charity can feature a person who renders help to the needy to accomplish the charity’s mission―a benefactor. In practice, some charities have already been featuring a benefactor in their appeals. For example, United Way, in early 2017 launched a docu-series named “The Hero Effect,” in which each episode features an ordinary citizen having a life-changing impact on an individual or a community. Yet, little is known about whether the benefactor appeal is more effective than the victim appeal in eliciting charitable donations, and if so, when and why.