Engaging through storytelling: the interplay of engagement with a story, cause, and charity

Abstract

Charities engage customers with their cause to encourage charity support behaviours (CSB) and often use storytelling to create that impact. We argue that mechanisms underpinning this process manifest in the story recipients’ engagement with a sequence of focal objects—from the story (i.e. through narrative transportation) to the cause it concerns (i.e. customer engagement), to the charity that supports the cause (i.e. CSB). An online survey (n = 585) required participants to alternatively read a story of a person experiencing homelessness or a general text about homelessness. Results show that narrative transportation leads to CSB through different cognitive, affective, and conative customer engagement paths. Using both narrative and non-narrative text, managers can appeal to specific dimensions of customer engagement to elicit high and low involvement CSB.