Charitable Crowdfunding Research Articles

Understanding Charitable Consumer Behavior on Digital Crowdfunding Platforms: Exploring the Influence of Cultural Values, Motivations, and Platform Attitudes

ABSTRACT Charitable crowdfunding on digital platforms has become a viable way for NGOs to raise funds. This study aims to investigate determinants of charitable behavior (CB) on digital crowdfunding platforms (DCPs), including national culture dimensions, motivations, crowdfunding platform attitude, and donors’ personal characteristics. Data were collected through a CAWI survey of 680 Amazon MTurk users from Europe, the Americas, and Southern Asia. Findings indicate that of the three national culture dimensions considered, CB on DCPs is positively associated with collectivism and negatively with uncertainty avoidance. The link between power distance and CB could be either positive, neutral or negative, due to the interactions with motivations for charity, uncertainty avoidance, and age. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations do not show significant direct effects on CB but appear to exert their influence through interactions with other motivations, national culture dimensions and respondents’ attributes. People with higher incomes tend to donate more the better is their attitude toward the DCP. CB is stronger among donors more involved in voluntary activities and those living in the Americas as compared to Europe and Asia. The study addresses the knowledge gap concerning the antecedents of CB on DCPs and suggests how NGOs could improve their fundraising effectiveness.

How do emotions affect giving? Examining the effects of textual and facial emotions in charitable crowdfunding

Drawing on emotional contagion theory and language-mediated association theory, this study develops a research model to examine how textual and facial emotions affect charitable crowdfunding performance. We use computer-aided techniques to extract and measure specific textual and facial emotions in pitches. The proposed model is tested via regression analysis with a sample of 1372 campaigns collected from the largest charitable crowdfunding platform in China—Tencent Gongyi. Moreover, we conducted a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the complementarity of textual and facial emotions, which supplements the regression analysis results. Our findings show that both textual and facial emotions can impact funding outcomes. However, the effects of specific emotions vary: some (e.g., textual sadness and facial anger) are positive, some (e.g., textual anger and facial fear) are negative, and others (e.g., textual fear, textual disgust, and facial sadness) are insignificant. Moreover, facial emotions complement textual emotions in their effects on funding outcomes. This research outlines a framework to offer a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of emotions in charitable crowdfunding. It also contributes to existing research by revealing the vital but complex role of emotions in the persuasive process of prosocial behaviors and by uncovering the different cognitive mechanisms underlying the impacts of textual and facial emotions.

Charitable crowdfunding donation-intention estimation depending on emotional project images using fNIRS-based functional connectivity.

Charitable fundraising increasingly relies on online crowdfunding platforms. Project images of charitable crowdfunding use emotional appeals to promote helping behavior. Negative emotions are commonly used to motivate helping behavior because the image of a happy child may not motivate donors to donate as willingly. However, some research has found that happy images can be more beneficial. These contradictory results suggest that the emotional valence of project imagery and how fundraisers frame project images effectively remain debatable. Thus, we compared and analyzed brain activation differences in the prefrontal cortex governing human emotions depending on donation decisions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a neuroimaging device. We advance existing theory on charitable behavior by demonstrating that little correlation exists in donation intentions and brain activity between negative and positive project images, which is consistent with survey results on donation intentions by victim image. We also discovered quantitative brain hemodynamic signal variations between donors and nondonors, which can predict and detect donor mental brain functioning using functional connectivity, that is, the statistical dependence between the time series of electrophysiological activity and oxygenated hemodynamic levels in the prefrontal cortex. These findings are critical in developing future marketing strategies for online charitable crowdfunding platforms, especially project images.

Regulating donation-based crowdfunding platforms in Hong Kong: A trust law framework

With the advance of technology, several crowdfunding platforms have emerged in Hong Kong to host informal public donation appeals. Unlike charitable crowdfunding activities, these appeals focus on crowdfunding to provide relief to specific individuals or groups in need. Due to the recent emergence of online informal public donation appeals and their lack of public benefit, regulatory bodies have not paid much attention to their regulation. However, recent media coverage highlighting scandals of maladministration of donation funds in the context of informal public donation appeals has impelled regulators to establish a systemic framework to govern crowdfunding platforms that host informal public donation appeals. This article addresses two main aspects of this topic. First, it discusses the operation of crowdfunding platforms that host informal public donation appeals and the risks associated with them. Second, it explores the feasibility of utilising trust law to regulate the administration of donation funds by these crowdfunding platforms.

Intention to Donate on Online Charitable Crowdfunding: Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

The effectiveness of online charitable crowdfunding is contingent upon the contributions made by donors. Given the significance and relevance of this topic, the primary objective of this research is to identify, examine, and provide a framework for understanding the intentions of donors who contribute to online charitable crowdfunding platforms. The literature search was conducted by PRISMA guidelines. Keyword searches were conducted in the Scopus and Science Direct databases until July 2023. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for the retrieved research yielded 34 papers. The study’s findings indicate that UTAUT and SOR exhibit the most prevalent occurrences. The technical and behavioral aspects are of utmost significance. Intrinsic motivation is driven by various factors such as empathy, trust, compassion, attitude, morality, and self-worth. The extrinsic factors include social influence, literacy, and perceived behavioral control. Given the results mentioned earlier, it is appropriate to draw a conclusion and propose avenues for future investigation. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of online charitable crowdfunding by identifying and analyzing the factors influencing donor intentions. The study highlights the significance of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, expanding the theoretical framework to encompass diverse factors such as empathy, trust, morality, and social influence.

Moment or movement – the heterogeneous impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on personal and societal charitable crowdfunding campaigns

PurposeWhenever social injustice tackled by social movements receives heightened media attention, charitable crowdfunding platforms offer an opportunity to proactively advocate for equality by donating money to affected people. This research examines how the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated social protest cycle after the death of George Floyd have influenced donation behavior for campaigns with a personal goal and those with a societal goal supporting the black community.Design/methodology/approachThis paper follows a quantitative research approach by applying a quasi-experimental research design on a GoFundMe dataset. In total, 67,905 campaigns and 1,362,499 individual donations were analyzed.FindingsWe uncover a rise in donations for campaigns supporting the black community, which lasts substantially longer for campaigns with a societal than with a personal funding goal. Informed by construal level theory, we attribute this heterogeneity to changes in the level of abstractness of the problems that social movements aim to tackle.Originality/valueThis research advances the knowledge of individual donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding. Our results highlight the important role that charitable crowdfunding campaigns play in promoting social justice and anti-discrimination as part of social protest cycles.

Cross‐media synergies between TV news media and social media in charitable crowdfunding

AbstractCurrent methods of creating awareness about charitable crowdfunding campaigns are mostly within online platforms (e.g., social media). However, TV news media continue to feature causes calling for donations, raising the question of whether TV media contribute to the success of charitable crowdfunding. This research measures the effect of TV news media alongside social media on charitable crowdfunding campaigns using secondary data scraped from a popular crowdfunding site. We find that campaigns shared on TV and social media (vs. social media alone) generate more funding and have more donors but take a significantly larger time to reach their target. Thus, in the context of charitable crowdfunding, there may be a tradeoff between volume of donations and donors and the speed at which campaigns conclude.

Behind the scenes: The role of writing guideline design in online charitable crowdfunding market

The online charitable crowdfunding platform has emerged as a powerful tool for raising funds from large crowds to support non-profit activities. Following a patronage model, fundraisers on the platform are forced to use compelling stories to capture the attention of individual donors. As such, conceptualizing a persuasive request narrative for projects posted on the platform becomes one of the most pressing issues. Project writing guidelines, as an important platform design, are widely adopted to help fundraisers. Unfortunately, their role in the market has not been well examined. To fill this research gap, we leverage a unique dataset from a leading donation-based crowdfunding platform in the United States and make full use of its policy change opportunity on writing guidelines to thoroughly investigate its impacts and the underlying mechanism on donors’ contributions. Our empirical results show that the more constraints the guidelines impose on writing, the more likely they are to weaken the persuasiveness of narratives. We specifically focus on three aspects of narrative complexity and find that writing guidelines have a negative impact on linguistic complexity, which in turn diminishes donors’ contribution behavior. Nevertheless, they have positive impacts on both content and structural complexity, with the difference being that increased content complexity weakens donors’ contributions, while higher structural complexity is more likely to attract donations. Moreover, we examine the heterogeneous effects of writing guidelines on fundraisers with varied involvements. These findings deepen our understanding of writing guidance design in online platforms and have implications for charitable crowdfunding platforms and fundraisers.

What Determines the Success of Charitable Crowdfunding Campaigns? Evidence from China During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The dramatic rise of charitable crowdfunding has changed the landscape of fundraising and giving. Little empirical work, however, has been done to explore critical factors that are associated with successful charitable crowdfunding campaigns run both by formal charities and non-charities. To advance the literature on donation-based charitable crowdfunding, we draw on a unique dataset of 427 COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns in China, examining whether and how external and internal quality signals are related to crowdfunding success measured by total donation amount. Our results show that crowdfunding success is positively associated with internal signals (updates and predefined duration), whereas the role of external signals (platform and award) is less certain. While we find a positive relationship between award information and funding success, informal campaigns using an alternative medium seem to generate more donations than formal campaigns using authorized platforms. The implications of this study for theory, practice and policy are also discussed.

Do expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have different impacts on attracting donations? Evidence from a Chinese online charitable crowdfunding platform

PurposeExtant research shows mixed results on the impact of expressed negative emotions on donations in online charitable crowdfunding. This study solves the puzzle by examining how different types of negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety and fear) expressed in crowdfunding project descriptions affect donations.Design/methodology/approachData on 15,653 projects across four categories (medical assistance, education assistance, disaster assistance and poverty assistance) from September 2013 to May 2019 come from a leading online crowdfunding platform in China. Text analysis and regression models serve to test the hypotheses.FindingsIn the medical assistance category, the expression of sadness has an inverted U-shaped effect on donations, while the expression of anxiety has a negative effect. An appropriate number of sadness words is helpful but should not exceed five times. In the education assistance and disaster assistance categories, the expression of sadness has a positive effect on donations, but disclosure of anxiety and fear has no influence on donations. Expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have no impact on donations in the poverty assistance category.Research limitations/implicationsThis work has important implications for fundraisers on how to regulate the fundraisers' expressions of negative emotions in a project's description to attract donations. These insights are also relevant for online crowdfunding platforms.Originality/valueOnline crowdfunding research often studies negative emotions as a whole and does not differentiate project types. The current work contributes by empirically testing the impact of three types of negative emotions on donations across four major online crowdfunding categories.

Influence mechanism of charitable crowdfunding context on individual donation intention: BASED on the SOR framework

ABSTRACT For philanthropic crowdfunding projects based on Internet platforms, their specific situational features(perceived credibility of the platform, perceived reputation of the project initiator and perceived persuasiveness of the project text) are important factors influencing the audience’s donation intention, but the exact mechanism of influence is not clear. This paper attempts to reveal the mechanism of the influence of crowdfunding contexts on individuals’ willingness to give, based on the SOR framework, combined with motivation theory, using crowdfunding situational characteristics as the initial stimulus and donor motivation as the psychological activity of the organism, with the help of mediating effects. At the same time, financial constraints are set as a moderating variable to examine whether personal financial status affects the transformation of motivation into a willingness to give. The results show that: firstly, the situational characteristics of crowdfunding projects (perceived credibility of the platform, perceived reputation of the project initiator and perceived persuasiveness of the project text) have a significant effect on individuals’ donation intention.Secondly, intrinsic motivation plays a significant mediating role in the path of influence of crowdfunding situational characteristics on donation intentions, and social influence in extrinsic motivation has a significant mediating role.Finally, the moderating effect of financial constraints was not significant in the pathway of intrinsic motivations (pity, guilt, satisfaction) on donation intentions. Similarly, the moderating effect of financial constraints on the pathway of extrinsic motivations (personal gain, social influence) on donation intentions was also not significant.

Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early US COVID-19 pandemic.

During the early months of COVID-19, many people in the US turned to charitable crowdfunding to seek and provide assistance. Little is known about the needs, hopes or experiences that motivated US pandemic crowdfunding and how these were correlated with campaign success. This study uses a mixed-methods data analysis of a randomised cluster sample of 919 US GoFundMe campaigns during the first 7months of the pandemic. Overall, most campaigns performed poorly, and 38% got no donations at all. The largest proportion of campaigns aimed to address individual, acute financial struggles, often arising from considerable challenges accessing or qualifying for government assistance. These campaigns, as well as those involving campaigners and beneficiaries of colour, tended to be least successful. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed three key crowdfunding motivations that reflect individualistic, agentive responses to the pandemic: struggling, helping and adapting. These motivations reveal a shift away from social suffering and collective mobilisation and towards largely individualised efforts of survival as digital crowdfunding becomes a key domain of crisis response. Crowdfunding platforms are playing an increasingly important role in mediating and influencing individual and collective responses to crisis, which has important political ramifications for how societies perceive and address health emergencies.

The effectiveness of using instagram content to promote charitable crowdfunding campaign

Crowdfunding has emerged as a new form of financing. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences in empathy and trust of potential donors when they find an Instagram content promoting charitable crowdfunding campaign using different types of message appeals and different levels of argument quality. This study is aimed to test whether issue involvement moderates the effect of empathy and trust on the intention to donate. To do so, an experimental design was conducted involving 180 undergraduate students from one university in Indonesia. The participants were Instagram active users who were familiar about crowdfunding. Result show Instagram content using altruistic appeal will generate stronger empathy compared to those using egoistic appeal, but different message appeals did not result significant difference on trust. Different levels of argument quality also generated different empathy and trust. Content with strong argument tends to produce stronger empathy and trust than those with weak argument. The empathy and trust of potential donors can have a positive impact on their intention to donate. In this study, it was found that issue involvement did not moderate the effect of empathy and trust on the potential donors' intention to donate.

The Importance of Project Description to Charitable Crowdfunding Success: The Mediating Role of Forwarding Times.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been a public health crisis of international concern, causing huge impact on people’s lives. As an important part of social public crisis management, how to quickly and effectively raise resources to participate in emergency relief in the era of self-media is a common challenge faced by global charitable organizations. This article attempts to use empirical evidence from Tencent charitable crowdfunding platform, the largest charitable crowdfunding platform in China, to answer this question. We consider 205 COVID-19 charitable projects and 11,177,249 donors to assess the process by which non-profit organizations raise funds through the information about project descriptions. Based on the effects of information and emotional framing, we explore the effects of the readability (i.e., complexity and understandability) and negative tone of the project description on fundraising amount. We then investigate the mediating role of forwarding times, as affective response to the text might explain forwarding times, which in turn affects money raised by increasing the visibility of the campaign. On this basis, the moderating role of recipient’s crisis involvement is tested during this process. The empirical results indicate that the complexity of the description will reduce the fundraising amount, while understandability and negative tone help to improve it. Furthermore, we found that forwarding times played an important mediating role in this process. Then the buffer effect of crisis involvement on the negative effect of complexity was validated, and its amplification on the positive effects of understandability was also verified.

A Study on the Influencing Factors of Individuals' Intention to Donate in Charitable Crowdfunding

Charity crowdfunding has become one of the most important donation channels in the Internet age. Faced with complex personality traits, can charity crowdfunding platforms attract a wide range of people to make donations? By integrating personality theory with cognitivist learning theory (SOR), and with the help of 449 questionnaire data, this paper examines the psychological mechanisms of altruistic and egoistic personality traits participating in crowdfunding donations and reveals the mediating role of media cognition and donation cognition. The study found that individuals with both altruistic and egoistic personality characteristics have the intention to donate in the context of crowdfunding platforms, and the formation of the intention to donate depends on the individual's cognition of crowdfunding donations, including the cognition of crowdfunding (media trust perception) and perception of donation (donation motivation), specifically, in the relationship between personality characteristics and donation intention, the three media trusts (donation platform trust perception, project initiator trust perception, and project text content trust perception) and three kinds of donation motivations (sympathy, guilt, and satisfaction) play an important mediating role, and the mediating mechanisms of altruistic and egoistic personality are slightly different. The research results have certain implications for the development of philanthropy in the Internet context.

The Impact of Algorithmic Components on Contributions in Charitable Crowdfunding

The Impact of Algorithmic Components on Contributions in Charitable Crowdfunding

Quantifying the Endogeneity in Online Donations.

Charitable crowdfunding provides a new channel for people and families suffering from unforeseen events, such as accidents, severe illness, and so on, to seek help from the public. Thus, finding the key determinants which drive the fundraising process of crowdfunding campaigns is of great importance, especially for those suffering. With a unique data set containing 210,907 crowdfunding projects covering a period from October 2015 to June 2020, from a famous charitable crowdfunding platform, specifically Qingsong Chou, we will reveal how many online donations are due to endogeneity, referring to the positive feedback process of attracting more people to donate through broadcasting campaigns in social networks by donors. For this aim, we calibrate three different Hawkes processes to the event data of online donations for each crowdfunding campaign on each day, which allows us to estimate the branching ratio, a measure of endogeneity. It is found that the online fundraising process works in a sub-critical state and nearly 70–90% of the online donations are endogenous. Furthermore, even though the fundraising amount, number of donations, and number of donors decrease rapidly after the crowdfunding project is created, the measure of endogeneity remains stable during the entire lifetime of crowdfunding projects. Our results not only deepen our understanding of online fundraising dynamics but also provide a quantitative framework to disentangle the endogenous and exogenous dynamics in complex systems.

Empathy or perceived credibility? An empirical study of Muslim donating behaviour through online charitable crowdfunding in Indonesia

PurposeThis study aims to analyse the factors influencing Indonesian Muslims’ donation behaviour through online charitable donation-based crowdfunding.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses the stimulus-organism-response framework, with technological characteristics, campaign characteristics and religiosity as the stimulus; empathy, perceived credibility and quality of relationship as the organism; and intention to donate as the response variables. In analysing the data, it used the structural equation modelling approach with the partial least squares method. The study involved 405 Muslim respondents who have donated through the largest online charitable crowdfunding platform in Indonesia.FindingsThe main findings suggest that empathy and perceived credibility are key determinants influencing the intention to donate through crowdfunding. Both factors are subsequently affected by initiator reputation, campaign popularity, content quality, transaction convenience and website quality. Such intention also goes hand in hand with the improved quality of relationships between the organisation and the donors, subsequently influenced by their religiosity.Practical implicationsThe main findings imply that fundraising campaigns and technology’s characteristics play a significant role in the intention to donate. Such findings are expected to enhance understanding of individuals’ philanthropic behaviour in Indonesia and to suggest appropriate operational strategies to facilitate individuals’ donation behaviour in charitable crowdfunding.Originality/valueDespite the high potential of charitable crowdfunding, studies regarding the factors influencing charitable donations made through such organisations remain scarce. This study contributes to the literature by taking the case of the largest online charitable crowdfunding platform in Indonesia.

Spatial and temporal patterns in Canadian COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns.

Online charitable crowdfunding has become an increasingly prevalent way for Canadians to deal with costs that they would otherwise not be able to shoulder on their own. With the onset of COVID-19 and related lockdown measures, there is evidence of a surge in crowdfunding use relating to the pandemic. This study gathered, classified, and analysed Canadian crowdfunding campaigns created in response to COVID-19 from GoFundMe.com, a popular crowdfunding platform. Spatio-temporal analysis of classified campaigns allowed for observation of emergent trends in the distribution of pandemic-related need incidence and financial support throughout the pandemic. Campaigns raising money on behalf of established charities were the most common in the sample, and accounted for the greatest portion of funding raised, while campaigns for businesses made up a small proportion. Dense metropolitan areas accounted for the vast majority of campaign locations, and total sample funding was disproportionately raised by campaigners in Ontario and British Columbia.

How do IT affordances support behavioral intention in charitable crowdfunding? The mediating effects of donor perceptions and motivations

PurposeSocial media technology has changed donors' decision-making process in online philanthropy compared with traditional charity. How do IT affordances support donor perceptions and motivations in charitable crowdfunding? The purpose of this study is to explore how the five sub-dimensions of charitable crowdfunding IT affordances (i.e. visibility, association, meta-voicing, trading and security) afford initiators and platforms in motivating donors to support charitable crowdfunding projects.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses a quantitative research approach. An online survey was conducted to collect research data from WeChat users who had experienced charitable crowdfunding. A sample of 344 valid responses were received and analyzed.FindingsThe results show that four of the five IT affordances facilitate donors' perceptions (perceived emotions and trust) and motivations (intrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations), and thereby increase behavioral intention on supporting charitable crowdfunding projects.Originality/valueThis study advances the affordances and online charity literature by examining the antecedents and outcome of perceptions and motivations that determining behavioral intention in more detail. The authors’ findings not only benefit researchers in explaining how technology helps donors perceiving projects and motivating them to donate online, but also assists practitioners in developing better charitable crowdfunding management strategy.