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The impact of peer, politician and celebrity endorsements on volunteering: a field experiment with English students

The impact of peer, politician and celebrity endorsements on volunteering: a field experiment with English students
The impact of peer, politician and celebrity endorsements on volunteering: a field experiment with English students
Endorsement is used by charitable organizations to stimulate public support, including monetary donations. This article reports a field experiment that examined the effect of leader and peer endorsement on student volunteering. The experiment was conducted with over 100,000 students from five UK universities and compared the effect on volunteering rates of email endorsements by politicians, celebrities, and peers, to a control group that received an email but no endorsement. We examined outcomes seven weeks after the original e-mails, including click-throughs to volunteering unit websites, attendance at volunteering training, registration with volunteering units, and actual volunteering. Peer endorsements reduced click-throughs to volunteering unit websites. There were positive treatment effects for endorsement by politicians on subsequent training but no significant effects of any of the endorsements on our other outcome measures. Overall, we found little support for the provision of leader and celebrity endorsement, and confirm negative effects for peer endorsement.
328-346
John, Peter
7f349277-6dac-49ab-9948-1af16f0655e1
James, Oliver
b7392e2f-8a57-492a-8c86-ead1eec80c98
Moseley, Alice
0da467e1-d68e-4d9a-b20e-5b2ca73fc6b2
Ryan, Matthew
f07cd3e8-f3d9-4681-9091-84c2df07cd54
Richardson, Liz
c4e98c2a-9051-43f3-be61-542e4df98dc1
Stoker, Gerard
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John, Peter
7f349277-6dac-49ab-9948-1af16f0655e1
James, Oliver
b7392e2f-8a57-492a-8c86-ead1eec80c98
Moseley, Alice
0da467e1-d68e-4d9a-b20e-5b2ca73fc6b2
Ryan, Matthew
f07cd3e8-f3d9-4681-9091-84c2df07cd54
Richardson, Liz
c4e98c2a-9051-43f3-be61-542e4df98dc1
Stoker, Gerard
209ba619-6a65-4bc1-9235-cba0d826bfd9

John, Peter, James, Oliver, Moseley, Alice, Ryan, Matthew, Richardson, Liz and Stoker, Gerard (2019) The impact of peer, politician and celebrity endorsements on volunteering: a field experiment with English students. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 31 (3), 328-346. (doi:10.1080/10495142.2018.1526743).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Endorsement is used by charitable organizations to stimulate public support, including monetary donations. This article reports a field experiment that examined the effect of leader and peer endorsement on student volunteering. The experiment was conducted with over 100,000 students from five UK universities and compared the effect on volunteering rates of email endorsements by politicians, celebrities, and peers, to a control group that received an email but no endorsement. We examined outcomes seven weeks after the original e-mails, including click-throughs to volunteering unit websites, attendance at volunteering training, registration with volunteering units, and actual volunteering. Peer endorsements reduced click-throughs to volunteering unit websites. There were positive treatment effects for endorsement by politicians on subsequent training but no significant effects of any of the endorsements on our other outcome measures. Overall, we found little support for the provision of leader and celebrity endorsement, and confirm negative effects for peer endorsement.

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Endorsement paper RR March 2018 accepted - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 23 May 2018
e-pub ahead of print date: 22 October 2018
Published date: 1 August 2019

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 422212
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/422212
PURE UUID: 293f26eb-6784-45d1-a328-b0841f94a24a
ORCID for Matthew Ryan: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8693-5063
ORCID for Gerard Stoker: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8172-3395

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Date deposited: 18 Jul 2018 16:31
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 06:41

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Contributors

Author: Peter John
Author: Oliver James
Author: Alice Moseley
Author: Matthew Ryan ORCID iD
Author: Liz Richardson
Author: Gerard Stoker ORCID iD

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