Visual persuasion in non-profit advertising : investigating the roles of emotional arousal, empathy and credibility for intentions to donate
Authors:   , Li Bingrui 
Published: February 2025

For non-profit advertisers choosing the most persuasive image is an essential strategic decision to attract attention and donors. The effectiveness of a donation advertisement depends on the persuasiveness of the visual or visual persuasion. This doctoral dissertation focuses on investigating visual persuasion and its effects on intention to donate or prosocial behavior in non-profit advertising. Study 1 (re)introduces the concept of visual persuasion by providing an overview of past publications and proposing a concept explication for its use in the context of donor advertising. The central idea is that visual persuasion in donor advertising is conceptually divided into different levels: emotional arousal, empathy and credibility. This new concept explication is expected to enhance the understanding of visual persuasion in donor advertising by providing ways to approach and measure it, both by researchers and non-profit advertisers. Study 2 reveals a robust negative linear relationship between valence and arousal in non-profit ad images at an aggregate level and individual level, which is different from commercial ad images. Furthermore, the findings shed light on the highly significant negative correlations between valence and intention to donate, and the highly significant positive correlations between arousal and intention to donate based on the valence classification of stimuli. Lastly, it has been found that arousal would play a mediating role in the relation between valence and intention to donate under three special conditions (targeting the female group at an aggregate level; selecting positively valenced images at an individual level; selecting negatively valenced images at an individual level). Study 3 tests how the valence match of images and texts in donor advertising affects prosocial behavior through the mediating role of different levels of emotional empathy (positive or negative). The results confirm the mediating role of negative empathy: Through the higher level of negative empathy, the combination of a negative emotional victim image and a negative emotional text is more effective in increasing prosocial behavior. However, the mediating role of positive empathy is not confirmed. These findings provide advice to advertisers on how to develop effective donation advertising strategies. Study 4 explores the underlying mechanisms of awareness of falsity’s effects on intention to donate by relating it to credibility as a mediator. An empirical study contrasts three non-profit ad campaigns respectively including real images, AI-generated images without tag indications, and AI-generated images with tag indications. The findings uncover that the non-profit ad campaign including real images motivates the highest levels of intention to donate than the non-profit ad campaign including AI-generated images, with or without tag indications, explained by the highest levels of credibility. Conversely, the non-profit ad campaign including AI-generated images with tags motivates the lowest levels of intention to donate than the ad campaign including real images and that including AI-generated images without tags, explained by the lowest levels of credibility. In summary, these studies contribute to conceptually dividing visual persuasion into three measurable and touchable dimensions (emotional arousal, empathy and credibility), and explore the roles of these three dimensions of visual persuasion underlying the effects of visual images on intention to donate or prosocial behavior in non-profit advertising.