You Did What with My Donation?! Betrayal of Moral Mandates Increases Negative Responses to Redirected Donations to Donor-to-Recipient Charities

While research identifies predictors of charitable giving, little is known about what happens after the donation takes place. Accordingly, the present work examines how consumers respond when they learn their donation to a donor-to-recipient (traditional) charity such as donorschoose.org (unitedway.org) has been used for a project that the donor did not select (prefer). Highlighting the dark side of charitable giving, the present work conceptualizes redirected donations as a service failure within a betrayal-based framework. Consistent with the proposed framework, three studies demonstrate that redirected donations increase perceived betrayal, which leads to lower future donation intentions and volunteering, and heightened negative word of mouth intentions and switching charities. Results also indicate that the sense of betrayal is magnified when the charity has a moral mandate to carry out the advertised project (i.e., the charity is a donor-to-recipient vs. a traditional charity, and the project is seen as morally imperative).