Abstract
Many forms of prosocial behaviour are highly institutionalized. They are facilitated by organizations that broker between donors and recipients. A highly effective tool that organizations use to elicit prosocial behaviour are solicitations for donations (e.g., of blood, time, or money). Using register and survey data on blood donations in the Netherlands, we examine to what extent compliance with these solicitations is predicted by being recruited via word of mouth (WOM) and talking about donations. Our model predicts that donors that are one unit higher on our measure of talking about donations (range = 1–4) have a 2.9 percentage points higher compliance with solicitations for donations. In addition, this association is stronger for novice donors. Our study demonstrates the social embedding of the donors’ decision-making processes about compliance. For practice, our results imply that organizations may increase their contributors’ communication about donations to increase the effectiveness of their solicitations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0281214 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-22 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 2 Feb 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 802227 to E.-M.M.] (funder website: https://erc. europa.eu/). Pamala Wiepking’s position at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is funded by the Stead Family (no website), her work at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is funded by the Dutch Postcode Lotteries (funder website: https://www. novamedia.com/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Mauricio Garnier-Villarreal for valuable remarks on an earlier version of the manuscript. We acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from participants at the 2021 European Conference on Donor Health and Management (ECDHM), the 2021 Conference of the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP), and the 2021 Annual Conference of the Association of Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2023 Schröder et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 802227 to E.-M.M.] (funder website: https://erc. europa.eu/). Pamala Wiepking’s position at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is funded by the Stead Family (no website), her work at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is funded by the Dutch Postcode Lotteries (funder website: https://www. novamedia.com/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Mauricio Garnier-Villarreal for valuable remarks on an earlier version of the manuscript. We acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from participants at the 2021 European Conference on Donor Health and Management (ECDHM), the 2021 Conference of the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP), and the 2021 Annual Conference of the Association of Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).
Keywords
- prosocial behavior
- blood donation
- decision-making
- social influence
- Social-ecological system
