Charities are constantly looking for new and more effective ways to engage potential donors in order to secure the resources needed to deliver their services. The current work demonstrates that creative activities are one way for marketers to meet this challenge. A set of field and lab studies show that engaging potential donors in creative activities positively influences their donation behaviors (i.e., the likelihood of donation and the monetary amount donated). Importantly, the observed effects are shown to be context independent: they hold even when potential donors engage in creative activities unrelated to the focal cause of the charity (or the charitable organization itself). The findings suggest that engaging in a creative activity enhances the felt autonomy of the participant, thus inducing a positive affective state, which in turn leads to higher donation behaviors. Positive affect is shown to enhance donation behaviors due to perceptions of donation impact and a desire for mood maintenance. However, the identified effects emerge only when one engages in a creative activity—not when the activity is non-creative, or when only the concept of creativity itself is made salient.

慈善机构一直在寻找新的更有效的方式来吸引潜在捐助者，以确保提供提供服务所需的资源。目前的工作表明，创意活动是营销人员应对这一挑战的一种方式。一组实地和实验室研究表明，让潜在捐赠者参与创造性活动会对他们的捐赠行为（即捐赠的可能性和捐赠的金额）产生积极影响。重要的是，观察到的效果被证明是独立于背景的：即使潜在捐助者从事与慈善事业（或慈善组织本身）的焦点事业无关的创造性活动，它们也成立。研究结果表明，参与创造性活动可以增强参与者的自主感，从而诱发积极的情感状态，这反过来又会导致更高的捐赠行为。由于对捐赠影响的看法和对情绪维持的渴望，积极影响被证明可以增强捐赠行为。然而，识别的效果只有在人们从事创造性活动时才会出现——而不是当活动没有创造性时，或者只有创造性概念本身被突出时。