Charity Donation Intention (CDI)

1. Abstract

The Charity Donation Intention (CDI) scale is a concise, tri-item psychometric instrument engineered to evaluate an individual’s subjective probability and behavioral intention to donate monetary resources to a designated charitable organization or philanthropic appeal. Developed and validated within experimental consumer psychology and advertising research by Hsieh and Yucel-Aybat (2018), the instrument isolates pure monetary prosocial commitments, purposefully distinguishing financial giving from non-monetary prosocial behaviors such as volunteerism, advocacy, or in-kind donations. The measure utilizes a 7-point semantic differential scale anchored by subjective probability descriptors: Unlikely/Likely, Improbable/Probable, and Impossible/Possible.

Across multiple empirical investigations examining the intersection of consumer implicit theories (growth vs. fixed mindsets), perceived cause controllability, and message benefit framing, the CDI has demonstrated robust psychometric properties. Internal consistency estimates across independent experimental studies have consistently yielded Cronbach’s alpha values exceeding .93 (α > .93), reflecting high item homogeneity and minimal measurement error. Factor analytic procedures confirm a strictly unidimensional latent architecture, with factor loadings uniformly surpassing .90 and demonstrating pronounced convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity in relation to real philanthropic outcomes, perceived message efficacy, and empathetic concern. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the CDI, detailing its conceptual foundations within the Theory of Planned Behavior, psychometric indices, structural validity, administrative procedures, and cross-disciplinary research applications.

2. Keywords

Charity Donation Intention, CDI, monetary donation, prosocial behavior, Theory of Planned Behavior, philanthropic appeals, implicit mindsets, charitable giving, psychometrics, semantic differential scale, behavioral intention, donor psychology.

3. Authors

The Charity Donation Intention (CDI) scale was operationalized and rigorously validated in peer-reviewed advertising and consumer psychology literature by:

• Meng-Hsien (Jenny) Hsieh, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, College of Business, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA. Dr. Hsieh’s research focuses on consumer behavior, prosocial decision-making, implicit mindsets, and advertising effectiveness.
• Ozge Yucel-Aybat, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, School of Business, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania, USA. Dr. Yucel-Aybat specializes in prosocial behavior, charitable appeals, consumer social responsibility, and framing effects.

Primary Publication Source: Hsieh, M.-H., & Yucel-Aybat, O. (2018). Persuasive charity appeals for less and more controllable health causes: The roles of implicit mindsets and benefit frames. Journal of Advertising, 47(2), 112–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2017.1405753

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Charity Donation Intention (CDI) scale is to deliver an ultra-brief, psychometrically sound, and highly reliable operationalization of a consumer’s or prospective donor’s conscious, cognitive intention to contribute financial resources to a targeted charitable organization. Within behavioral science, measuring actual behavioral end-points (such as real-time financial transactions) is frequently constrained by laboratory logistics, survey platform limitations, participant financial heterogeneity, and privacy mandates. In accordance with established sociocognitive models, behavioral intentions represent the immediate, most proximal antecedent to volitional behavior. The CDI provides researchers with a calibrated metric that reliably captures this critical psychological threshold.

Research Applications

In empirical and experimental research, the CDI serves as a sensitive dependent variable across various experimental paradigms:

• Persuasive Message Framing: Testing the interaction between self-benefit versus other-benefit frames in non-profit marketing appeals.
• Cognitive and Mindset Manipulations: Investigating how growth (incremental) versus fixed (entity) mindsets alter donation inclinations when health conditions are framed as controllable versus uncontrollable.
• Attribution and Blame Studies: Evaluating how donor perceptions of victim responsibility or moral culpability affect monetary support.
• Emotional and Affective Drivers: Gauging how feelings of empathy, guilt, moral elevation, or warm glow translate into quantitative shifts in giving intentions.

Applied and Non-Profit Settings

Beyond academic laboratory experiments, the CDI has functional utility in organizational and applied non-profit environments:

• A/B Testing of Creative Collateral: Charitable organizations can pre-test direct mail copy, online banner advertisements, video appeals, and landing pages to determine which creative variation elicits the highest donor probability prior to launching multi-million-dollar capital campaigns.
• Audience Segmentation: Non-profit marketing teams can assess baseline donation intentions across diverse demographic, geographic, or psychographic donor segments to customize stewardship journeys.
• Longitudinal Tracking: NGOs can deploy the scale longitudinally to gauge fluctuations in institutional donor commitment following positive brand achievements or adverse public relations events.

5. Psychological Construct

The Charity Donation Intention (CDI) scale measures a unidimensional construct situated at the intersection of prosocial behavior, donor psychology, and behavioral decision theory: monetary donation intention. Intention is conceptualized not as a vague wish or moral aspiration, but as an individual’s subjective assessment of the subjective likelihood, probability, and operational possibility of executing a discrete financial sacrifice for a non-profit entity.

Monetary Specificity vs. Generalized Prosociality

A critical psychometric attribute of the CDI is its exclusive focus on monetary contributions rather than generalized prosociality. Prosocial action encompasses a multifaceted spectrum of behaviors, including physical volunteering, public advocacy, social media sharing, blood donation, and organ donation. Literature consistently demonstrates that the psychological calculus governing financial giving diverges markedly from that governing time or labor commitments (e.g., Mogilner & Aaker, 2009; Liu & Aaker, 2008). Time donations activate emotional meaning, personal identity, and self-actualization motives, whereas monetary donations invoke financial resource trade-offs, mental budgeting constraints, cost-benefit calculations, and economic utility evaluations. By explicitly querying the likelihood of donating money, the CDI eliminates construct contamination introduced by non-monetary giving modalities.

Deconstruction of Tri-Item Semantics

The three items of the CDI approach subjective behavioral probability through three subtly differentiated cognitive lenses:

• Likelihood (Unlikely / Likely): Assesses subjective expectations based on perceived behavioral control, personal preferences, and situational disposition. It reflects the respondent’s baseline behavioral projection: “Given who I am and what I have seen, will I do this?”
• Probability (Improbable / Probable): Engages an analytical, statistical self-estimation. This framing prompts participants to weigh competing expenditures and mental accounting constraints, evaluating the mathematical odds of executing the transfer: “What is the realistic chance of this transaction occurring?”
• Possibility (Impossible / Possible): Probes the perceived boundaries of feasibility, perceived behavioral control, and structural constraint. While an act might be deemed “possible” without being “probable,” anchoring the construct across this semantic spectrum ensures the scale captures both absolute perceived barrier thresholds and probabilistic behavioral execution: “Is this within my operational horizon?”

When combined, these three items form a coherent construct capturing the full cognitive continuum of donor behavioral readiness.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Charity Donation Intention scale is rooted in foundational theories of human decision-making, social cognition, and persuasive communication.

The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

The primary theoretical foundation of the CDI is Icek Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior. According to the TPB, human action is guided by three types of considerations: behavioral beliefs (attitudes toward the behavior), normative beliefs (subjective norms), and control beliefs (perceived behavioral control). These three constructs converge to produce an intention, which represents the most proximal cognitive precursor to actual behavioral performance:

Ajzen established that intention serves as a critical proxy for behavior whenever the behavior is under volitional control and measured with high specificity regarding target, action, context, and time (TACT principle). The CDI adheres strictly to the TACT principle by specifying the target (the charity featured), the action (donating), the resource (money), and the context (the presented appeal).

Implicit Mindset Theory (Dweck)

In the seminal research by Hsieh and Yucel-Aybat (2018), the CDI was employed to illuminate Carol Dweck’s Implicit Mindset Theory within prosocial contexts. Individuals hold implicit lay beliefs regarding the malleability of human traits: entity theorists believe traits (intelligence, moral character, health vulnerability) are fixed and unchangeable, whereas incremental theorists believe traits are malleable and capable of developmental growth. Hsieh and Yucel-Aybat demonstrated that the impact of implicit theories on donation intentions is moderated by perceived cause controllability:

• When a health crisis or social problem is perceived as controllable (e.g., type 2 diabetes or lung cancer associated with lifestyle factors), incremental theorists display higher donation intentions when presented with self-benefit appeals, whereas entity theorists respond more favorably to other-benefit appeals.
• When a cause is perceived as less controllable (e.g., congenital childhood disorders), the alignment of implicit mindsets and benefit frames shifts significantly, modulating donation probability via changes in perceived donor impact.

Attribution Theory and Moral Framing

The CDI also intersects with Bernard Weiner’s Attribution Theory of motivation and emotion. Attribution theory posits that observers assign causal responsibility for an individual’s misfortune. If victims are perceived as responsible for their predicament (high personal controllability), observers experience less sympathy, more anger, and report reduced intentions to help financially. Conversely, when misfortune is attributed to external, uncontrollable systemic factors, empathetic arousal peaks, driving higher scores on the CDI.

7. Validity

The Charity Donation Intention scale has demonstrated exemplary psychometric validity across experimental paradigms, laboratory trials, and online field contexts.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by high inter-item correlations (typically ranging between r = .80 and r = .92, p < .001) among the three semantic differential items, indicating that “likely,” “probable,” and “possible” tap into the exact same underlying latent construct. Furthermore, convergent validity has been established through strong, statistically significant correlations with established allied constructs:

• Attitude toward the Charitable Organization ($A_{org}$): Positive attitudes toward the non-profit brand consistently correlate with CDI scores ($r \approx .65$ to $.78$).
• Attitude toward the Charitable Advertisement ($A_{ad}$): Favorable evaluations of the advertising message predict heightened donation intentions ($r \approx .58$ to $.71$).
• Empathetic Concern and Sympathy: State empathy elicited by charitable imagery correlates strongly with CDI scores ($r \approx .50$ to $.68$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated via Average Variance Extracted (AVE) and confirmatory factor analytic modeling. In structural equation models containing related but conceptually distinct prosocial constructs, the AVE for the CDI consistently exceeds .80, well above the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Moreover, the shared variance between the CDI and constructs such as volunteer intention, non-monetary word-of-mouth advocacy, or baseline chronic guilt remains substantially lower than the AVE of the CDI itself, verifying that monetary donation intention is psychometrically distinct from general prosocial goodwill or non-monetary volunteer commitments.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Predictive validity is confirmed by the scale’s capacity to detect subtle shifts in donor willingness under varying experimental manipulations. In Hsieh and Yucel-Aybat (2018), the CDI exhibited sensitive, statistically significant variations across experimental treatments involving manipulated benefit frames (self vs. other) and measured implicit mindsets (fixed vs. growth). Furthermore, validation studies incorporating behavioral choice paradigms (e.g., providing participants with an actual bonus compensation lottery and allowing them to pledge real cents or dollars to the featured charity) show that CDI scores predict actual monetary allocation with strong correlation coefficients ($r = .52$ to $.64$, p < .001), validating its utility as a robust surrogate for real financial behavior.

8. Reliability

The Charity Donation Intention scale displays exceptional internal consistency and measurement precision despite its concise, three-item structure.

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

In psychometric measurement, an internal consistency coefficient above .70 is considered acceptable for exploratory research, .80 is regarded as good, and .90 or above is categorized as excellent. In the foundational validation studies by Hsieh and Yucel-Aybat (2018), the CDI was administered across three separate empirical investigations involving distinct charitable contexts, health conditions (e.g., controllable vs. uncontrollable illnesses), and participant cohorts. Across all three studies, the scale exhibited extraordinary reliability:

• Study 1: Cronbach’s α = .94
• Study 2: Cronbach’s α = .95
• Study 3: Cronbach’s α = .93

Subsequent independent studies employing this exact tri-item semantic differential configuration have reported consistent Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega (ω) coefficients consistently falling between .91 and .96, indicating that the scale is essentially free from random item-specific measurement noise.

Composite Reliability and Item-Total Statistics

Composite reliability (CR) values calculated within structural equation modeling frameworks uniformly exceed .93, well above standard methodological thresholds (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988). Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the three items routinely surpass .85, demonstrating that no single item compromises or disproportionately skews the overall scale index.

9. Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) provide unequivocal support for the strictly unidimensional structural configuration of the Charity Donation Intention scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to EFA using principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction without rotation, the three items consistently collapse into a single dominant factor possessing an eigenvalue substantially exceeding 2.50 (accounting for 85% to 92% of the total variance across datasets). Item factor loadings are exceptionally strong and uniform:

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Because a standard single-factor model with three indicators is statistically saturated (just-identified with zero degrees of freedom, $df = 0$), empirical evaluation of fit indices is typically conducted within larger measurement models incorporating related latent variables (e.g., ad attitude, perceived cause responsibility, social distance). In such multi-factor models, the CDI indicators consistently demonstrate superior global and local fit:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .05 (90% CI [.000, .072])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .025

No cross-loadings or substantial correlated error residuals have been observed across standard model modifications, corroborating strict unidimensionality and metric invariance across diverse donor subpopulations.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Charity Donation Intention (CDI) instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Charity Donation Intention (CDI)
• Construct Assessed: Subjective monetary donation intention toward a specific non-profit entity or charitable appeal
• Measurement Format: Standardized, self-administered survey questionnaire
• Number of Items: 3 items
• Response Format: 7-point semantic differential scale (1 = Unlikely / Improbable / Impossible to 7 = Likely / Probable / Possible)
• Administration Duration: Approximately 30 to 45 seconds
• Target Population: General consumer and adult donor populations (applicable to adolescents in adapted formats)
• Scoring Protocol: There are no reverse-scored items. The overall score is calculated as the arithmetic mean across the three items:
  CDI Index = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3

  Possible scores range continuously from 1.00 to 7.00, where higher composite scores represent a greater subjective probability and stronger behavioral intention to donate money to the specified organization.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Charity Donation Intention (CDI) scale was published in its validated format in 2018 by Meng-Hsien Hsieh and Ozge Yucel-Aybat in the Journal of Advertising. As an academic psychometric measure published within peer-reviewed scientific literature, the instrument is available under fair-use conventions for scholarly, educational, and non-commercial research purposes without royalty fees, provided proper academic attribution and citation are rendered.

Commercial entities, non-profit consultancies, or market research agencies seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial software, fee-for-service diagnostic audits, or monetized consumer intelligence platforms should contact the corresponding authors and the copyright holder (Taylor & Francis / American Academy of Advertising) to secure appropriate institutional permissions.

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Bagozzi, R. P., & Yi, Y. (1988). On the evaluation of structural equation models. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 16(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02723327
• Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Hsieh, M.-H., & Yucel-Aybat, O. (2018). Persuasive charity appeals for less and more controllable health causes: The roles of implicit mindsets and benefit frames. Journal of Advertising, 47(2), 112–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2017.1405753
• Liu, W., & Aaker, J. (2008). The difference between alternatives to spend time versus money. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 543–557. https://doi.org/10.1086/588699
• Mogilner, C., & Aaker, J. (2009). “The time vs. money effect”: Shifting product attitudes and decisions through personal connection. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1086/597169
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

13. Items of the Scale