MAKING HEALTH COMMUNICATION SELF-FUNDING - EFFECTIVENESS OF PREGIVINGIN AN AIDS FUNDRAISING EDUCATION CAMPAIGN/

This field experiment was conducted as part of a joint door-to-door fu ndraising-community education campaign for a local AIDS organization. Its purpose was to assess the impact of four variants of the pregiving compliance-gaining tactic. Households randomly were assigned either t o a control condition or to one of the four treatment conditions estab lished via a 2 x 2 factorial design. The independent variables were be nefactor costs (low versus high) and value labeling (present versus ab sent). The respondents at households assigned to the low benefactor co st condition were given a single pamphlet about AIDS before being aske d for a donation, whereas high benefactor cost prospective donors were offered a more extensive information packet. For half the households in the low- and high-benefactor cost conditions, the educational mater ials distributed were labeled as ''very important, life-saving informa tion.'' No such labeling was used for the remaining households. Prospe ctive donors from the control households simply were asked to make a d onation; no pamphlet or information packet was distributed. Three hypo theses derived from Indebtedness Theory were tested. First, it was pre dicted that control donors would be less charitable than pregiving don ors; this hypothesis was supported. Second, prospective donors who wer e given a more costly information packet were expected to be more char itable than prospective donors who were given only a pamphlet; this hy pothesis was not supported. Third, it was predicted that prospective d onors would be more charitable when the solicitor labeled the pregiven benefit as valuable than when no such language was used; this hypothe sis was not supported. The failure to find support for the second and third hypotheses is explained by their interaction. Value labeling fac ilitated compliance when used with the more expensive information pack et, but was counterproductive when employed with a single pamphlet. Ap plied and theoretical implications are discussed.