Research on the Influencing Factors of Public Welfare Documentary Crowdfunding Supporters

Abstract

The rapid development of the Internet has driven the development of the China's crowdfunding model. In recent years, the development of public welfare crowdfunding in China is no less than equity-based crowdfunding and reward crowdfunding. In public welfare crowdfunding, documentaries that have been in a state of low popularity have also begun to develop in the form of crowdfunding, and gradually become popular and public. Such kind of crowdfunding even began to show up in the theater, raising public's attention and reaction. Although the research on documentary crowdfunding in foreign countries has gradually matured, there is little research on the relationship between documentaries and crowdfunding in China. Since crowdfunding is funded by investors, how to motivate supporters to participate and achieve the goal of fundraising is a critical issue that project initiators need to pay efforts to. Thus this paper does research on the factors affecting investors to participate in the documentary crowdfunding, under the references of the theories of crowdfunding, motivation, mass participation behavior and so on. Taking sponsors' behaviors of participating in the public welfare documentary crowdfunding as the research object, this paper examines the effects of two intrinsic motivations: personal interest, altruism and three extrinsic motivations: social responsibility, expected tangible returns, expected intangible returns on investors' participation. In this paper, the data were collected by questionnaires and SPSS22.0 was used to conduct descriptive statistical analysis, reliability test, factor analysis, regression analysis and so on. The results indicate that the altruism, personal interest, social responsibility and expected intangible returns are significantly positively correlated with investors' participation willingness, while there is no significant correlation between the expected tangible returns and participation willingness. It is hoped that this research can provide some valuable suggestions for media workers, documentary crowdfunding sponsors and the public welfare crowdfunding website.