Dr Sarah-Louise Mitchell

Social Purpose Organisations (SPOs) and Social Marketing are the forefront of a societal shift in our collective desire to live better, to cause less damage to our planet and to leave fewer people behind in our quest for progress. Against the challenging backdrop of the rise in cost of living, war and the pandemic globally, it is through innovative thinking and disruptive practices that SPOs and Social Marketing can help to improve people’s health and wellbeing, protect our planet through improving air quality, water quality and biodiversity and deliver social justice. Consumers want organisations to play a bigger role in tackling these complex issues as distrust in government’s ability to make a difference continue to rise. The growing momentum behind an ambition to live in a sustainable way, underpinned by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, uniquely offers SPOs and Social Marketing an opportunity to drive innovation and creativity. This was the rationale driving this Special Issue on “Delivering Impact for Social Good”.

With the opportunity to write an editorial piece to introduce the Special Issue our team wanted to do something different. So, we are not going to summarise the excellent papers within this issue; their abstracts are clear and will signpost you to the research most relevant to your work and interests. What we will do is reflect personally, as individuals, on what motivates us to contribute to social impact knowledge and practice – and where we see the field going. In a small way, we want to raise our voices to encourage others.

Purpose

Social impact research remains in its infancy. The purpose of the paper is to build on Keeling and Marshall’s (2022) “Call for impact” paper and develop a comprehensive social impact pathway (SIP) framework. The aim is to encourage marketing researchers, non-profits and corporations to pursue impactful work that is valued, planned, monitored and evaluated.

Design/methodology/approach

The conceptual paper explores the complexities of estimating social impact drawing from a range of illustrative cases.

Findings

The paper identifies a lack of clarity in the understanding and application of impact and presents a pathway aimed at increasing focus on social impact across future work to deliver the net-positive changes that are needed to reverse biodiversity decline, climate change and social and health inequalities that continue to be persist and be experienced by so many planet wide.

Research limitations/implications

This paper contributes a pathway forward to encourage and support increased utilisation of the framework in future marketing research.

Practical implications

Mapping and measuring SIPs are concerted efforts directing understanding towards identifying the activities that are contributing to the delivery of outputs that can achieve intended outcomes. The measurement of impact directs investment towards activities that ensure net-positive gains are achieved.

Social implications

Ever growing social inequities, health disparities, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation occur when practices are left unchecked. A focus on impact avoids greenwashing practices, ensuring that an understanding of what has changed because of the work is transparently reported.

Originality/value

This paper aims to encourage marketing researchers to engage in social change projects, rather than solely disseminating academic findings. Emphasising the importance of an outside-in approach, this paper highlights the necessity of showcasing accumulated outcomes to demonstrate impact.

This conceptual paper extends theories of gift giving behavior through identifying and defining the emerging phenomenon of Avenger Philanthropy. This manifests when people make individual monetary donations to nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to achieve a collective sense of moral grandstanding, usually underpinned by humor. For the first time, the paper makes sense of this phenomenon theoretically through drawing on a wide range of literature including gift giving, game theory and consumer psychology, and as a result, identifies seven distinctive hallmarks. The paper maps the importance of public expression of personal values, amplified through social media, together with risks for the NPO that benefits from the donations. Emotion underpins the giving behavior, both moral outrage and humor. This investigation contributes to the gift giving literature by identifying, mapping and anchoring current actions that potentially have far reaching consequences for future research and for nonprofit practice.

Purpose: Nonprofit organisations (NPOs) are an increasingly fundamental part of our society. Meeting rising demand requires NPOs to attract enough resources, especially volunteers, to enable service delivery. This paper adopts a novel theoretical lens to reframe this marketing challenge to inform practice and extend theory.

Design/method/approach: Practice-based exploration of a volunteer-enabled NPO, parkrun, through depth interviews and secondary source analysis.

Findings: The research identified that the brand community connects volunteers through three inter-connected levels. The big idea of parkrun, the focal brand, resonated with people through being ‘on their wavelength’, something they believed in. The local, physical event meant engagement was ‘on their patch’, anchored in place. Finally, the brand community enables people to volunteer ‘on their terms’, with fluid roles and flexible levels of commitment.

Practical implications: Clear recommendations for practice include the opportunity to integrate service beneficiary with service delivery enabler (volunteer) to strengthen the implicit social contract, increasing participation to deepen the social identity felt towards the brand, and key practices that reduce barriers to volunteering.

Research limitations/implications: Not all NPOs have service beneficiaries who are able to volunteer, services with different volunteering roles, or operate through a local physical presence.  However, taking a focal brand approach, to consider the brand community through which people volunteer for an NPO, the practices that reinforce that community, and how to offer volunteers significantly greater flexibility of both role and commitment presents an opportunity for NPOs to rethink how volunteering works for them in the future.

Purpose - A significant management issue for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is the disconnect between services beneficiaries and the funders of those services. Individual donors and fundraisers provide the resources to enable other people (or animals) to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to address this service management challenge through new types of customer service interactions that bring together service donors and service recipients through innovative digital communication.

Design/methodology/approach - Based on a review, and illustrated by recent examples of innovative best practice, the authors develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication. 

Findings - The paper starts by identifying the problem of ‘nonprofit service disintermediation’.

The paper also outlines the inadequacies of popular frameworks of communication, widely taught in business schools, to understand the new reality of customer-service organisation engagement in the digital age.  Through adopting a customer engagement lens, the paper develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

Research limitations/implications - Given the authors’ focus on the intersection between new communication opportunities and customer service interactions, this paper adds novel insight to theory and raises important implications for management.

Originality - The paper explores how, through these new communication interactions, engagement with, and loyalty to, the brand is built over time in a fluid and dynamic way. It identifies a disintermediated relationship, distinct to other service contexts, but significant in terms of value and social impact.

Many nonprofit organisations (NPOs) deliver their services and mission through volunteers. Brand has been shown to be a powerful influence on the decision to volunteer. What was not known was the role brand plays in volunteer choice between NPOs. Understanding this enables NPOs to be more effective at attracting the volunteers they need, particularly given limited budgets. Using Framework Analysis with a large qualitative sample, this paper contributes to that gap in knowledge. The research identifies three constructs driving volunteer choice of NPOs, sources of Brand Knowledge, level of Brand Engagement, and the behavioural process of choice, labelled Brand Discovery. Through exploring the relationship between these constructs, the study points to significant implications for NPOs for volunteer recruitment, importance of brand presence, and competitive set.

Responding to a call for research into storytelling within the nonprofit context, the paper contributes to an emerging research conversation about communicating organizational strategy through storytelling. The research analyses one hundred stories across 10 leading organizations to identify how they are being deployed and what that tells us about the underpinning strategy. Through bringing story character, classification, and content together for the first time, the paper presents a holistic perspective on the story construct. It identifies that, when viewed as a whole, the stories told by organizations can be a powerful communication tool for reaching external audiences. However, the research also identifies that their ability to convey strategic purpose through storytelling is moderated by storytelling capability. It finds that organizations with stronger storytelling capability use this craft to differentiate themselves more effectively. It concludes with contributing a new conceptual model for understanding organizational storytelling and a roadmap for practitioners to strengthen storytelling capability.

Purpose – This paper explores how volunteers choose one nonprofit organisation (NPO) rather than another. It identifies the drivers of choice, and the relationship between them, to enable NPOs to strengthen their volunteer recruitment.

Design/methodology/approach - 51 service-delivery volunteers were interviewed, drawn from five leading NPOs. A laddering technique was used to understand the context in which the choice of organisation was made and the underlying personal needs and goals. The data was analysed using means-end chain methodology to uncover the relationships between, and hierarchy of, the decision drivers.

Findings - Brand, cause, and role were found to be important in meeting personal needs and goals through volunteering. The paper makes three contributions. Firstly, it presents a clearer understanding of NPO choice through adopting an integrated theoretical perspective. Secondly, it identifies the decision-making process and key relationships between the attributes of the NPO, the consequences for the volunteer, and the connection to their personal needs. Finally, the study makes an important contribution to literature through presenting a new conceptual framework of volunteer decision-making in the nonprofit context to act as a catalyst for future research.

Research limitations/implications - This research is both impactful through, and limited by, its context selection: regular service-delivery volunteers from five NPOs within two causes. The paper presents a rich research stream to extend this understanding to other nonprofit stakeholders, other causes including medical charities, and smaller NPOs.

Practical implications - In an increasingly competitive nonprofit environment with a growing need to support the vulnerable in society, NPO sustainability is dependent on their ability to recruit new volunteers. NPOs compete not only with other organisations with similar causes but also those offering similar volunteering roles, and other uses of time to meet personal needs such as sport, career, or community. Understanding how volunteers make their choice of NPO rather than other uses of their time is of vital importance to make the most effective use of scarce marketing resources.  This paper contributes to that practitioner understanding.

Originality/value - The authors are the first to extend the understanding of generic motivations of volunteers to consider specific choice of NPO. Unlike previous literature, the authors bring together theory on brand, cause, and role with personal needs. The authors are also the first to apply means-end chain methodology to the nonprofit context in order to uncover the personal underlying, less salient reasons behind NPO choice and the relationship between them.

The paper critically re-examines product life-cycle (PLC) theory, developed over fifty years ago. Despite prevalence in marketing pedagogy and continued popularity within empirical research, PLC is seldom challenged. The paper identifies the organisation-centric construct underpinning the theory and highlights a disconnection between PLC theory and the recent academic insight around customer engagement. It reconceptualises the life-cycle concept based on engagement between stakeholder and non-profit organisation (NPO), structured upon both the market orientation and social exchange constructs. The revised framework maps stakeholder engagement with the NPO through the five stages of incubation, interaction, involvement, immersion, and incapacitation. The paper concludes with identifying a roadmap for future empirical research to develop and validate the re-envisaged conceptual model. The methodology used is narrative literature review supported by secondary research from specialist practitioner reports.