Relationship quality, relationship marketing, and client perceptions of the levels of service quality of charitable organisations

Purpose – To investigate possible linkages between the relationship marketing activities of charitable organisations and the calibres of the relationships that charities establish with their beneficiaries. Also to identify the specific relationship marketing functions that contribute most to the development of good relationships between charities and their beneficiary clients.Design/methodology/approach – One hundred beneficiaries of UK “helping and caring” charities were questioned about their perceptions of the service quality of the organisations that had given them assistance, their satisfaction with a charity's services, the character of their relationship with the charity, and the calibres of five different forms of relationship marketing (e.g. advertising, database marketing) employed by the charity. A model was constructed and estimated using the method of partial least squares. Perceived service quality was measured via adaptations of the SERVQUAL instrument but without any assessments of the res...

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