Emotional Delivery in Pro-social Crowdfunding Success

Abstract

How do fundraisers effectively use emotions in pro-social crowdfunding platforms? Pro-social crowdfunding platforms allow for online campaigns to raise money, and these fundraisers rely more heavily on emotions to attract backers because there are no financial incentives to contribute to these campaigns. People give to pro-social crowdfunding campaigns out of empathy and sympathy for the campaign beneficiaries. Using prior research on empathy, we considered the emotional drivers of empathy and examined how campaigns convey those emotions using campaign pictures and language. We analyzed the facial expressions in campaign pictures and the emotional words in the campaign language, and we found that emotions shape fundraising success. Furthermore, our study shows that the same emotion - happiness/joy - leads to different fundraising success based on whether it is conveyed visually or textually. A future experiment will more explicitly connect these emotions to empathy in potential backers.