A Study of Donation-Based Crowd Funding Platforms

Abstract

Persuasion is the process of communication in which a person wants to create an influence to induce certain behaviour sends a persuasive message to the other individual with the aim of generating an impact on the recipient's attitude. The power of decision making, however, is at the disposal of the recipient. Various technologies are used by the donation based crowd funding platforms to persuade the website visitors to make donations for certain causes. The main objective of the study was to focus on the specific factors that are used by the donation based crowd funding platforms to persuade the prospective donors to make donations to specific campaigns. Exploration methods were used to obtain the necessary data through online questionnaires. The questionnaire mainly included close ended questions where most of the questions were designed for the people who have donated using crowd funding platforms to react on a Likert scale of 5 (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree). Total sample size was 230. Simple Random Sampling method was used to collect the data. The researcher has explained a model where building a new concept in the set of factors that are specifically applicable for the donors who contribute for donation based crowd funding campaigns. The model shows that using technology in persuasion and having a higher social networking presence can affect the donation intention of the website visitors to a considerable extent. The model also shows that various privacy issues, trust and overall website quality also have a major impact on the donation intention of the donors. In the end, the study also shows that the donation intention of the donors is highly positively correlated with the donation behaviour.