Paper Title
The Interplay of Anthropomorphism and Message Framing on Donation Intention

Abstract
Donating to charity is a valuable behaviour that is frequently triggered or bolstered by emotional impulses from advertising. To increase the donation intention of consumers, firms use visual cues such as anthropomorphism along with messages in their advertisements. Anthropomorphism is an attribute to characterize non-human objects into human-like characters, intentions and behaviors. It kindles the curiosity of the people by humanizing the objects and expressing the information to be conveyed as a simple message. This technique has given a lot of positive outcomes; however, many studies have proved that they also give negative outcomes as well. Earlier studies have looked at the effectiveness of donation requests that use happy victim images. The study on how message framing, anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic cues in the advertisement affects the donation behavior with the mediating effect of perceived credibility remain unexplored. The goal of this study is to look at the influence of anthropomorphism and message framing in affecting customers’ donation intentions in charity advertising that use perceived credibility as a mediator. The study is mainly based on primary data and a convenience sampling technique was adopted for 169 respondents from an online survey. The study has applied one-way and two-way ANOVA to prove that elements of anthropomorphism and negative message framing are more effective than non-anthropomorphic cues and positive message framing. Perceived credibility is the underlying mechanism that explains the relationship between anthropomorphic cues, message framing and donation intention. To conclude, the research holds valuable contributions for charities to effectively utilize the concept of anthropomorphism and message framing to develop advertisements that will effectively promote the intention to donate. Keywords - Anthropomorphism, Donation Intention, Charity, Perceived Credibility and Message Framing