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

合作研究：思维导图消费者和活动家对非政府组织与企业合作伙伴关系的反应

• 批准号: 1359610
• 负责人: Michelle Shumate
• 金额: $ 23.22万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-04-15 至 2018-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1359610&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Mind; Mapping; Consumers

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.

非营利组织和公司越来越多地建立了伙伴关系来解决各种社会问题。伙伴关系可以采取多种形式，包括慈善事业，营销，品牌认证和集体影响安排。通过交流，合作伙伴关系的轮廓是由不同的利益相关者群体知道的，从而影响了态度，购买意图，捐赠的意图以及参与行动主义的意图。该研究通过使用一系列的三个在线实验来绘制消费者和激进主义者的企业和非政府组织的心理模型，研究了激进主义者和消费者对有关公司非政府合作伙伴关系的各种信息的反应。该项目实现了三个重要目标：（1）为了进一步了解传播的非政府组织合作伙伴关系对消费者和激进主义者的态度，购买意图，购买意图，捐赠意图，捐款和参与激进主义的意图的影响，（2）了解这些信息可以通过范围来理解某些或不包括某些信息特征和3）的方式来理解此类信息的最初成对的方式（3）调节这些关系。知识分子的优点：该项目的智力优点是三个方面。首先，它通过调查塑造个人心理模型如何发展以纳入新信息的因素来为语义网络的研究做出贡献。其次，该项目扩展了对品牌配对的先前市场研究，以包括更广泛的社会问题，消费者（即激进主义者）以外的利益相关者以及多种类型的非政府组织企业合作伙伴关系。第三，它通过对理论驱动的命题的测试来促进对非政府组织伙伴关系网络的广泛理解。更广泛的影响：这项研究对教育，政策和行业产生了三个更广泛的影响。首先，该项目通过将本科和研究生研究人员汇集在一起​​，推进社会科学和计算机科学跨学科的合作和创新。因此，它旨在通过科学方法培训新一代学生。其次，这些发现将阐明为什么某些非营利组织不太可能受到公共资金的支持，从而使决策者可以就可以将哪些社会问题移交给私人资金来源，而哪些社会问题将继续需要纳税人支持。第三，随着公司试图改善与消费者的关系并限制活动家的风险曝光，这些发现将为行业领导者提供有关沟通如何影响利益相关者对合作伙伴关系的信息的信息。