Abstract
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic devasted public health agencies and the federal government across the world. Bridging the gap between underserved populations and the healthcare system, the donation-based crowdfunding campaign has opened a new way for suffering individuals and families to access broader social network platforms for financial and non-financial assistance. Despite the growing popularity of crowdfunding during the pandemic crisis, little research has explored the various signals that attract potential donors to donate. This study explores the effects of signaling theory on the success of a crowdfunding campaign for food relief launched in GoFundMe during which the United States was severely affected by the pandemic with a surged number of coronavirus infected cases from 1 March with 134 confirmed COVID-19 infected cases to 29 July with 4,295,308 infected cases according to World Health Organization. The following results show that the three different signal success measures are important to the success of crowdfunding campaigns: (1) signals originating from the campaign (Title, Description, Spelling Error, Location, and Picture); (2) signals originating from the fundraiser (Social Network, and Update); and (3) signals originating from the social interaction of the fundraiser with the crowd (Comment, Follower, and Share). These findings provide insight and bring additional knowledge contribution to the crowdfunding literature.
Highlights
During a time of disaster or tragedy, victims and survivors who do not have adequate resources to support themselves and their families often rely on their networks, as government and charitable support may be slow or even lacking
According to the likelihood ratio chi-square test, the results show that the full model represents a significantly better model fit than the null models
The significant improvement in model fit compared with the null models and significant R2 scores demonstrate that independent variables are an essential and significant portion of the dependent variable in each model (See Table 5)
Summary
During a time of disaster or tragedy, victims and survivors who do not have adequate resources to support themselves and their families often rely on their networks, as government and charitable support may be slow or even lacking. The crowdfunding platforms allowed anonymous internet users to provide help and donation to the fundraisers directly. Organizing financial assistance online through crowdfunding platforms (e.g., GoFundMe, Kiva, YouCaring) has emerged as an alternative and effective method to seek support and has become a popular form of caregiving. The current largest social fundraising platform, GoFundMe.com, raised over USD 9 billion by individuals since its inception in 2010 (see http://www.gofundme.com/, accessed on 3 March 2020). In the United States, donationbased crowdfunding (DbC) accounts for USD 293.5 million of financing [1]. Berliner and Kenworthy [2] stated the rise of medical or DbC in the United States for two reasons: the first is the fiscal crisis in American health care during the 2008 global financial crisis. The second, the growing social assistance systems of online social networks
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