 Does irritation induced by charitable direct mailings reduce donations?Merel van Diepen, Bas Donkers and Philip Hans Franses International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2009, vol. 26, issue 3, 180-188 Abstract: Charities rely mainly on direct mailings to attract the attention of potential donors. Individuals may feel irritated by these mailings, in particular when they receive many mailings. This might harm the revenues charities receive from their mailing activities. Moreover, target selection by charities likely results in many mailings being sent to the best donors, and hence they might become most irritated. As such, irritation with direct mailings could well be endogenously determined. To ensure exogenous variation in irritation, we performed a unique controlled field experiment in cooperation with five of the largest charities in the Netherlands. Our analysis reveals that direct mailings do result in irritation, but surprisingly, this irritation affects neither stated nor actual donating behavior. Keywords: Direct marketing; Irritation; Charity donations; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:26:y:2009:i:3:p:180-188 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2009.03.007 Access Statistics for this article International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.