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

越来越多的非营利组织和企业建立了伙伴关系，以解决各种社会问题。这种伙伴关系可以采取多种形式，包括慈善事业、公益营销、品牌认证和集体影响安排。通过沟通，伙伴关系的轮廓被告知不同的利益相关者群体，从而影响态度，购买意图，捐赠意图和参与行动的意图。该研究通过使用一系列的三个在线实验来绘制消费者和活动家对公司和非政府组织的心理模型，来考察活动家和消费者对各种关于公司-非政府组织伙伴关系的信息的反应。该项目实现了三个重要目标：（1）进一步了解非政府组织与企业合作对消费者和活动家的态度、购买意图、捐赠意图和参与行动的意图的影响，（2）了解这些信息通过包含或排除某些信息特征来克服最初不一致配对的方式，以及（3）了解不同形式的非政府组织-企业伙伴关系如何调节这些关系。智力价值：这个项目的智力价值是三方面的。首先，它有助于语义网络的研究，通过调查塑造个人的心理模型如何演变，以纳入新的信息的因素。其次，该项目扩展了以前对品牌配对的营销研究，包括更广泛的社会问题，消费者以外的利益相关者（即，活动家），以及多种类型的非政府组织-企业伙伴关系。第三，它通过检验理论上提出的建议，有助于对非政府组织-公司伙伴关系网络有广泛的了解。更广泛的影响：这项研究为教育，政策和行业部门提供了三个更广泛的影响。首先，该项目通过汇集本科生和研究生研究人员，推进社会科学和计算机科学跨学科合作和创新。因此，它的目的是培养新一代的学生在科学方法。其次，调查结果将阐明为什么一些非营利组织不太可能得到公共资金的支持，从而使政策制定者能够做出明智的决定，哪些社会问题可以交给私人资金来源，哪些将继续需要纳税人的支持。第三，随着公司寻求改善与消费者的关系，并限制活动家的风险敞口，调查结果将为行业领导者提供有关沟通如何影响利益相关者支持伙伴关系的信息。

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.