How website information decreases intangibility and influences donation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to understand how online marketing communications influence donors. This article postulates, in the online arena, by taking the intangible and making it real, definite, solid, or easily grasped, one can positively impact donation. The data were collected in a lab where respondents from a university in the southwest United States explored a well‐known nonprofit website. Following the exploration, they responded to a series of survey questions. The findings show that a well‐designed website decreases perceptions of intangibility and increases donation. For inexperienced donors, the affective aspects of the site are more influential in determining donation. Our study is one of the first to focus on how specific information on a nonprofit website may influence donation with regards to intangibility. Our work was limited by the use of students and hypothetical situations. By utilizing cognitively and affectively laden website characteristics effectively, nonprofits can influence decision making and subsequent donation through organizational perceptions of intangibility.

Examining the intersection of culture and stewardship: Assessing how the most visited art museums promote their philanthropic missions

“…Across the varying forms of arts philanthropy, ranging from foundations and corporations to individuals, it is reasonable to assert that all charitable givers will at some point, if not at the point of first interaction, visit the website of the museum. In fact, recent scholarship indicates that nonprofit websites decrease intangibility and increase donation (Alhoqail & Floyd, 2021) a phenomenon we anticipate was exacerbated for arts museums when stay‐at‐home orders prevented in‐person visits, requiring many institutions to rely on their websites for offering cultural enrichment, education and human connection. Thus, the significance of these portals of information cannot be overstated.…”

How do we measure the intangible? Overcoming the measurement challenge in services

“…Services are largely intangible as they lack a physical presence and therefore cannot be perceived by the senses of sight, smell, or sound. This makes it challenging for customers to evaluate and assess the quality of a service (Alhoqail & Floyd, 2021; Zeithaml et al, 1985). The intangibility of services causes problems with quality control for service providers, gives rise to evaluation issues for consumers, raises consumers' risk perception, and has a major impact on service marketing (Bebko, 2000; Mishra et al, 2021; Moin et al, 2021; Sun et al, 2012; Wirtz et al, 2020).…”

“…Despite recent debates related to the IHIP paradigm, intangibility continues to be researched as a core aspect of services, as evident from recent scholarly work (Alhoqail & Floyd, 2021; Choi & Leon, 2020; Fay et al, 2022; Heller et al, 2019; Mishra & Anning‐Dorson, 2022; Zhou & Mao, 2021). Scholars have investigated how the complexity and intangibility of the compromises present in digital interactions pose a threat to societal well‐being (LaBarge et al, 2022), the impact of intangibility in the case of luxury services (Wirtz et al, 2020), how the intangibility of foodservice influences the perception of service fairness for consumers (Kim et al, 2018), how consumers' perceptions of intangibility impact their prepurchase, usage, and postpurchase experiences (Hellén & Gummerus, 2013), the influence of intangibility in the case of online consumer behavior (Mazaheri et al, 2014), and overcoming the challenges due to intangibility in the context of online retailing (Heller et al, 2019; Mishra et al, 2021), among others.…”

“…Additionally, service scholars have looked into the circumstances in which changing the degrees of intangibility of offerings may be helpful. Existing research suggests that lowering intangibility levels may be beneficial in certain service contexts, such as for online retailers who use virtual reality and AR technologies to address psychological and physical intangibility problems related to product evaluation (Mishra et al, 2021), and for nonprofit websites that solicit donations (Alhoqail & Floyd, 2021). On the contrary, some situations necessitate an increase in intangibility levels, such as experiential offerings, because “the intangible nature of experiential products has the biggest effect on well‐being and provides similar levels of well‐being as life experiences” (Guevarra & Howell, 2014, p. 30).…”