Media reporting of natural disasters and its impact on disaster relief
Final Report Abstract
The project was concerned with the media reporting of natural disasters and its impact on disaster relief. At the start of the project the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we seized the opportunity of the presence of this unprecedented natural disaster to ask whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected pro-sociality among individuals? After the onset of the pandemic, many charitable appeals were updated to include a reference to COVID-19. Did donors increase their giving in response to such changes? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a realdonation online experiment with more than 4200 participants from 149 local areas in England and over 21 weeks (study 1). First, we varied the fundraising appeal to either include or exclude a reference to COVID-19. Second, in a natural experiment-like approach, we studied how the relative local severity of the pandemic and media coverage about local COVID-19 severity affected giving in our experiment. We concluded that individuals responded positively both to experimentally manipulated awareness about the pandemic as well as to the local severity and donated more than other participants. We showed that the latter observation was inherently linked to media reporting about COVID-19 severity. In study 2, we analyzed the role of social media for the charitable market. Using the Facebook advertising tool, we implemented a natural field experiment across Germany, randomly assigning almost 8,000 postal codes to Save the Children disaster-related fundraising videos or to a pure control. We found that (i) video fundraising increased donation revenue and frequency to Save the Children during the campaign and in the subsequent five weeks; (ii) the campaign was profitable for the fundraiser; and (iii) the effects were similar independent of video content and impression assignment strategy. However, we also found non-negligible crowding out of donations to other similar charities or projects. Finally, we demonstrated that click data are an inappropriate proxy for donations and recommend that managers use careful experimental designs that can plausibly evaluate the effects of advertising on relevant outcomes. Altogether, we find that social media is effective at stimulating donations. In study 3, we have collected disaster related news articles from 07.2018-12.2022 and evaluated them both using machine learning techniques and by engaging crowdworkers. Those evaluations included emotionality of the articles for 20 different emotions as defined in the Geneva emotional wheel, number of individuals affected or killed, whether the articles presented an identifiable victim story or predominantly statistical information, whether it mentioned authority, etc. In the first step, we evaluated how the content of articles affects retweets. Contrary to our hypothesis, the preliminary results suggest that, accounting for disaster-type, disaster country (or region), and newspaper fixed effects, the content does not influence the retweet frequency.
Publications
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COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?. Experimental Economics, 25(3), 824-844.
Adena, Maja & Harke, Julian
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Does Online Fundraising Increase Charitable Giving? A Nationwide Field Experiment on Facebook. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Adena, Maja & Hager, Anselm
