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