CHARITY ORGANIZATIONS ADOPTING VIRTUAL REALITY MODALITY: THEORIZATION AND VALIDATION

ABSTRACT Communicators of charity organizations have begun to adopt virtual reality modality to draw in more donors in recent years. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical exploration and empirical verification on the avenues that may optimize the function of virtual reality modality for communication conducted by charity organizations. To fill this gap, the current study proposes and validates a framework based on integrative extension of theories pertaining to enactive cognition, media affordances, and personal norm. As the research result suggests, the five immersive affordance attributes of vividness, authenticity, coherence, interactivity, and controllability are primary facilitators of empathy and personal norm activation in the virtual reality context. The type of virtual reality modality, which provides immersive affordance attributes to exercise the transformative change effect, serves to elicit charitable donation intention through evocation of empathy and personal norm activation as the two key mediators. More noteworthy, the positive impact of empathy on charitable donation intention significantly increases due to the partial mediating effect of personal norm activation. Overall, the research result contributes to enhancing the effectiveness of communication conducted by charity organizations.