Exploring Stakeholders’ Assessments of Organizational Identity and Identification in the Context of CSR Partnerships

Using an experimental design with non-fictitious organizations, we examine how stakeholders (N = 845) describe corporations and nonprofits. We interrogate the types of words stakeholders include in their mind maps of corporations and nonprofits prior to receiving information about a partnership. Descriptive results indicate that nonprofits received more concepts than corporations the three most popular categories were product or service, target market/beneficiaries, and description of organization type. Further, we identify how stakeholders amend their organizational identity descriptions when a corporate-nonprofit partnership is communicated. Preliminary findings indicate that respondents delete concepts but add new links between concepts after reading about the partnership scenarios. Finally, we consider how different levels of identification influence how stakeholders describe and amend their descriptions of nonprofits and corporations. Our approach relies on a novel method and software, BrANDi (Brand Associative Network Diagram), to identify the various attributes stakeholders assign to each partner and how those attributes are altered when a partnership is communicated.