Mobilizing Group Membership

James N. Druckman and Donald P. Green

SAGE Open, 2013, vol. 3, issue 2, 2158244013492781

Abstract: A randomized experiment was conducted to assess the effectiveness of three forms of e-mail appeals to prospective members of a newly formed professional group. The baseline condition consisted of an impersonal appeal; prospective members were sent a mass e-mail encouraging them to join. Participants in the personal condition received an e-mail with the same content, prefaced by a personal note from the group president. Participants in the social pressure condition received a personal note that called attention to the fact that they had previously signed a petition to form the professional group and urged them to make good on their earlier pledge (i.e., signing of the petition). Personalization is found to generate strong and statistically significant treatment effects. Even stronger are the effects of social pressure.

Keywords: mobilization; field experiment; professional organization; social pressure; personalized e-mail (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244013492781 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:3:y:2013:i:2:p:2158244013492781

DOI: 10.1177/2158244013492781

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().