Does the involvement of charities matter? Exploring the impact of charities’ reputation and social capital on medical crowdfunding performance

Abstract

In recent years, charities have become involved in many online medical crowdfunding projects as fundraising agents. To reveal whether and why the involvement of charities influences medical crowdfunding performance, this study conducts a sequential exploratory-explanatory research design with two main studies. By collecting 22,805 projects from the Chinese Tencent GongYi platform, the first study utilizes propensity score matching (PSM) to investigate which type of initiators (individuals vs. charities) have better crowdfunding performance. The results show that the initiator type is an essential predictor of medical crowdfunding, and projects launched by charities keep better performance than those by individuals. Upon the findings of the first study, the second study is performed to inspect why charities make more contributions than individual fundraisers. The impacts of charities’ reputations and social capital on medical crowdfunding performance are examined based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and social capital theory. The results suggest that charities’ reputations and multidimensional social capital play essential roles in endorsing crowdfunding fundraising (fundraising performance) and appealing to donors’ attention (participation performance). In addition, the disease type moderates the relationship between charities’ reputation or social capital and crowdfunding performance. Our research provides in-depth insight into the impact of charities’ involvement on medical crowdfunding and generates important implications for medical crowdfunding practices.