Abstract
Charitable organizations are clearly aware of the impact of emotions and seek to elicit emotional responses towards their causes by employing social media (SM) content that appeals to the empathetic side of donors. Although prior studies suggest accounting disclosures can reinforce people’s emotive states, it is not clear if, or how, these accounts can elicit emotions to encourage donations to relieve human-made disasters. The aim of this article is therefore to ascertain: how accounting’s emotive power can be harnessed to increase charity donations during human-made crises. The authors examine the case of a high-profile Ukrainian charity fund to gain insight into this issue. This study employs content analysis to analyse the charity’s accounts and determine which emotions were elicited through their SM accounts. Repenning’s classification of emotions in accounting research is used; the article adds to the novel stream of literature on the role of charity organizations in managing human-made disasters and accounting on SM.