The Impact Of Nostalgic Tendencies On The Willingness Of Individual Donations

In recent years,many natural disasters happened in China,such as snow and ice disaster in 2008,5 · 12 Wenchuan earthquake,Yushu earthquake in 2010,Zhouqu landslides,floods and drought in southern China in 2011 and so on.The charitable donations made some progress,but also showed many problems:low levels of donation willingness;public trust in charitable organizations is not high;slow development of small and medium sized charitable organizations;the intetion of continuing donation to a charitable organization is not strong.In foreign countries,the level of donation willingness began to decline in nearly two years.How to get more people involved in donations and make them to continuallydonate more money and goods to a charitable organization.Some scholars have proposed solution in perspectives of Macro and meso level.The authors try to analyze donors’ nostalgic feelings in the micro perspective of charitable organizations.We believe that donors’nostalgic feelings will affect trust and relationship commitment to organization to a certain extent,thereby affect the intention to donate.To demonstrate this point of view,we conducted the following study:(1)The author describs the development atatus and problems of charitable donations,proposes a new perspective-the donor’s nostalgic feelings to solute the problems,and preliminary analysises the relationship between donors’ nostalgic feelings and intention to donate.(2)The author conducts a literature review for donation behavior,nostalgia and the consumer-brand relationships,proposes a new research perspective.(3)The author proposes a "nostalgia-the relationship variables-donation"theoretical model and then develops some research hypotheses.(4)Based on the literature,according to China’s social and cultural characteristics,the author develops measurement scale for each variable of theoretical models,carries out pre-project research and revises some scale items.(5)The author carries out a large sample survey,makes project analysis by descriptive statistics,correlation analysis,factor analysis and other methods,and evaluates the validity and reliability of measurement scales.Through exploratory,confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling analysis,the underlying assumptions research hypotheses are tested.Through above analysis,the paper reached the following conclusions:(1)The main influence factors of personal nostalgic proneness are:insecurity,past experience,loneliness,recovery from grief and so on.(2)Nostalgic intensity consists of two dimensions:familial intesity and emotional intensity.There is a positive causal link between nostalgia proneness and familialintesity and emotional intesity.However,in terms of current research of nostalgia intesity,there may be other dimensions and other influencing factors to be studied.(3)Donor’s sense of trust in charitable organizations originate from their personal psychological variables,such as the nostalgic felling in addition to charitable organizations improving their performance,and timely feedback and efficient communication(Sargearnt,2006).The greater the degree of the nostalgia intensity of the donor is,the more he trusts in charitable organizations.(4)From the perspective of relationship marketing,relationship commitment is the most critical variable to determine consumer buying behavior.In the context of charitable donation,the donors’ relationship commitment to the charitable organizations significantly influences their donation willingness and donation behavior.(5)In the context of donation,the main source of relationship commitment consists of emotional intensity,followed by trust,and finanly familial intesity.Trust makes great impact on relationship commitment.However,donors’ nostalgic felling makes greater influence on relationship commitment.In order to Improve the level of donations,charitable organizations should focus more on the psychology communication with donors,and stimulate their nostalgic feelings(also includes other emotions)Based on the previous studies,the paper makes some innovations in the following aspects:(1)The author makes a breakthrough at the research idea of the nostalgic feelings:trying to analyze the function of nostalgic feelings from a longitudinal perspective.Nostalgia includes two levels:nostalgic proneness and nostalgia intensity.Nostalgia intensity is composed of two demesions:familial intensity and emotional intesity.(2)In the research model,nostalgia does not directly effect on puchase(donation)decision,brand relationship is a key variable which converts nostalgic feelings to donation behavior.This is different from the traditional direct path:from consumer nostalgia to purchase(donation)decision.Results of this study show that nostalgic feeling of nostalgia positively impacts on the brand relationship(some dimensions such as trust,commitment and so on),thereby affecting the donate willingness.(3)The application of nostalgia theory in economic and management is mainly concentrated in the old brand activation,product development,advertising,packaging and other fields,this paper attempts to explore the personal nostalgia in the new field:charitable donations.The managers of charitable organizations of medical,illness,education and other types can design nostalgic communicate demands to evoke nostalgic feelings of donors whicn can help managers to carry out effective market segementation and positioning.Additionally,managers can use the communication mechanisms of nostalgic community to enhance the whole community’s willingness to donate and donation level.