Full Length Article
Public responses to nonprofit social media messages: The roles of message features and cause involvement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2021.102038Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Test what makes nonprofit social media posts effective in driving behavioral intent.

  • Information sharing is predicted by a message appeal × interactivity interaction.

  • Information seeking is predicted by a message appeal × cause involvement interaction.

  • Information seeking is also predicted by an interactivity × cause involvement interaction.

  • Donation intention is predicted by an interactivity × cause involvement interaction.

Abstract

This study aims to answer the question of what makes a nonprofit social media message effective in driving favorable behavioral outcomes from publics. Toward this purpose, it draws on multidisciplinary theoretical insights from public relations literature, functional interactivity research, the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing. It theorizes an information-processing account to predict and explain the interplay among social media message appeal (emotional versus informational appeal), functional interactivity (high versus low interactivity), and individuals’ cause involvement (high versus low involvement) on public behavioral outcomes including information sharing, information seeking, and donation intentions. Results of an online experiment revealed significant two-way interactions between message appeal and functional interactivity, between message appeal and cause involvement, and between functional interactivity and cause involvement on different behavioral outcomes. These results bring novel theoretical and practical insights on when, how, and why nonprofit social media communication can be effective.

Section snippets

Literature review

To advance our understanding of the effects of message appeal, functional interactivity, and cause involvement on publics’ communicative and behavioral outcomes, we first review relevant insights from the ELM (Petty et al., 1983, Petty & Caccioppo, 1986a) and the limited capacity model of mediated message processing (Lang, 2000, 2006) to provide an overarching theoretical account of the study. We then discuss the three antecedents and propose our hypotheses and research question accordingly.

Method

A 2 (message appeal: informational vs. emotional) x 2 (functional interactivity: high vs. low) x 2 (cause involvement: high vs. low) factorial experiment was conducted online with 294 participants in the United States recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). In the experiment, message appeal and interactivity were manipulated and social cause involvement, as an individual trait variable (Yoon & Tinkham, 2013), was measured. Table 1 summarized participants’ demographic profile.

Results

Social cause involvement was an individual trait variable (Petty & Cacioppo, 1990). Therefore, to investigate the effects of functional interactivity and message appeals among participants with high or low cause involvement, this study followed prior studies’ approach (Braverman, 2008; Kim, 2018; Yoon & Tinkham, 2013): Participants were split into low-cause-involvement (M = 3.44, n = 152) and high-cause-involvement groups (M = 5.8, n = 142) via a median split (Mdn = 4.875) based on their

Discussion

This research aimed to answer the important question of how NPOs may create effective social media messages to engage publics at varying levels of cause involvement. Toward this purpose, predictions were made based on insights from the ELM, the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing, computer-mediated communication research, and public relations literature. This interdisciplinary perspective provided novel insights on how the two crucial message features, namely

Funding

This research project was funded by the Arthur W. Page Center Legacy Scholar Grant (#1718MD06).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

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