Collaborative Research: Mind Mapping Consumers and Activists' Response to NGO-Corporate Partnerships

Increasingly, nonprofits and corporations have created partnerships to address a variety of social issues. The partnerships can take many forms including philanthropy, cause marketing, brand certification, and collective impact arrangements. Through communication, the contours of the partnership are made known to different stakeholder groups thereby influencing attitudes, intention to purchase, intention to donate, and intention to engage in activism. The research examines both activists and consumers' reactions to a variety of messages about corporate-NGO partnerships by using a series of three on-line experiments to map both consumers and activists' mental models of corporations and NGOs. This project fulfills three important objectives: (1) to further our understanding of the impact of communicated NGO-corporate partnerships on consumers and activists' attitudes, intention to purchase, intention to donate, and intention to engage in activism, (2) to understand the ways that such messages might overcome initially incongruent pairings through the inclusion of or exclusion of certain message characteristics, and (3) to understand how the different forms of NGO-corporate partnership may moderate these relationships.

Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project is three-fold. First, it contributes to the study of semantic networks by investigating factors that shape how individuals' mental models evolve to incorporate new information. Second, this project extends previous marketing research on brand pairings to include a broader spectrum of social issues, stakeholders beyond consumers (i.e., activists), and multiple types of NGO-corporate partnerships. Third, it contributes to a broad-based understanding of the network of NGO-corporate partnerships through its testing of theoretically driven propositions.

Broader Impacts: This research offers three broader impacts for educational, policy and industry sectors. First, the project advances social science and computer science interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation by bringing together undergraduate and graduate student researchers. As such, it aims to train a new generation of students in scientific methods. Second, the findings will illuminate why some nonprofits are less likely to be supported by public funding thus allowing policymakers to make informed decisions about which social issues could be turned over to private funding sources and which will continue to need taxpayer support. Third, as companies seek to improve relationships with consumers and limit risk exposure from activists, the findings will offer industry leaders information regarding how communication influences stakeholders support of partnerships.