"In the minds of creative persons": social representations of producers of humanitarian and charitable communication

Abstract

Charity communication campaigns, essential for humanitarian and charitable organizations to raise funds, use persuasive messages to get the general public to support them financially. However, in spite of the fundamental stakes of these campaigns, in the literature no research has been carried out on the social representations that the producers mobilize when they conceive the messages. Conducted from eighteen campaign producers for charitable and humanitarian organizations, this qualitative survey aims to better understand how persuasive messages are designed. The results show that producers create naive causal theories about the psychological effects caused by different persuasive processes. The fundamentally different social representations between experienced and less experienced producers lead them to conceive openly different messages. They concern reception and influence, the perceived receivers, their motivation, the degree of complexity of the message and the types of affects that the latter must generate. After discussing the scientific validity of social representations in the light of experimental research on persuasive communication, we give some recommendations to producers, indicate the limitations and new research perspectives.