Saving Little Swimmer, Jumper, and Digger: Three Survey Experiments Testing Kinship Appeals in Conservation Marketing

Addressing the plight of threatened and endangered species requires direct public appeals for resources, yet charitable contributions to environmental causes and organizations are low. Conservation organizations use a variety of marketing strategies to obtain resources from target audiences, but there remains a need for strategies that appeal to broad audiences. This Chapter explores whether kinship appeals, whereby species targeted for conservation are portrayed as kin to humans, are likely to successfully elicit positive feelings and resource contributions across a wide range of demographic and cultural differences. It does so by means of three survey experiments, each of which measured the willingness of respondents to aid a different imaginary species alternatively described by means of kin, anthropomorphic, or neutral terms. Our results indicate kinship appeals have a small but significant positive impact on willingness to support conservation efforts, as respondents presented the kinship appeal often report being more likely to donate to conservation efforts and tell a friend about the efforts. However, this impact appears to be limited by the charisma of the species targeted for conservation. While these results are mixed, they suggest the value of kinship appeals and survey experiments to further explore them and other conservation marketing strategies.