Are Goodwill Ambassadors Good for Business? The Impact of Celebrities on International Organization Fundraising

Bibliographic Data

ID6435281
AuthorsRabia Malik (0000-0002-7661-2578, University of Essex, corresponding author), Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir (0000-0002-6776-4393, University of Iceland)
Year2024
Volume12
Issue3
Pages1-13
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Experimental Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2052-2630 • E-ISSN: 2052-2649
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/xps.2024.6
OpenAlexW4401217611
LanguageEN
References cited31

Many international organizations (IOs) rely on voluntary contributions from member states and private actors to fund their operations. Donations from individuals are a significant and increasing income source for these IOs, who rely on marketing strategies such as celebrity endorsement, in the form of Goodwill Ambassadors, to help raise funds. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of this strategy in the context of IOs although intuition from literatures in marketing and psychology suggests that celebrity endorsement should be effective. We conduct a survey experiment to investigate the effectiveness of Goodwill Ambassadors and, contrary to expectations, find no average effect of celebrity endorsement on donations to, and interest in, IOs and only limited effects among certain sub-groups. We speculate that the context of IOs makes it harder to generate the type of connection between celebrity and cause necessary to make endorsement effective and suggest that further investigation is needed

Business · Business administration · Goodwill · Political science · Public relations · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Digital Marketing and Social Media · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Accounting

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