A study on the influencing factors of the public's willingness to donate funds for critical illness crowdfunding projects on network platforms.

Lu Chen,Liru Pan,Heng Zhao,Wanshi He,Fan Luo,Barbara Guidi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0263706

Abstract

As an emerging charity model, critical illness network crowdfunding provides a source of funds for some critically ill patients in China who have difficulty paying their high treatment costs by themselves. This study aims to investigate the influencing factors of the public's willingness to donate to critical illness crowdfunding projects on Internet platforms. From a perspective combining the technology acceptance model and the theory of planned behavior, a complex and comprehensive structural equation model is proposed. We randomly selected 1,000 members of the public in China and empirically verified the study framework through structural equation modeling (SEM) based on 710 valid questionnaires. The results show that the public's donation willingness and the social distance to a critical illness crowdfunding project on an online platform positively affect the public's donation behavior, and donation attitude positively affect donation willingness; perceived usefulness and empathic concern positively affect the public's donation attitude, which in turn affects its donation willingness. This study confirms that members of the public are more likely to help people who have similar demographic factors or people who are similar to themselves and have the same values, i.e., people who have a close social distance. It innovatively proposes and verifies the hypothesis that empathic concern can significantly positively affect users' perceived usefulness and donation attitude. Strong empathic concern triggers donation willingness and behavior.

Highlights

Perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness are the main indicators of technology acceptance behavior, which in turn affect the user’s behavioral attitude
In the process of information dissemination and reception, people who have demographic factors similar to those of recipients or people who are similar to recipients and have the same values are often psychologically positioned as "owners" and have strong emotional resonance, which triggers donation behavior
When the public believes that the interactions and information exchanged on online critical illness crowdfunding platforms are credible, this credibility will increase their trust in such platforms, and they will agree more with the view that “donating through the critical illness crowdfunding network platforms can help the target audience”, enhancing the public’s willingness to donate and its actual donation behavior

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of the Internet in recent years, the diversified network applications and services of China’s "Internet +" have flourished, promoting the transformation of Chinese society and, simultaneously, providing more opportunities to identify people who highly agree with the mission or beliefs of organizations [1].

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