Research On Influencing Factors Of Fundraising Performance And Design Mechanism On The Online Charitable Crowdfunding Platform

Crowdfunding was first used by individuals and entrepreneurs to collect smallsized investments from crowds via the Internet to support for-profit ventures.Due to the advantages of low cost,high efficiency,and wide coverage,crowdfunding technology has revolutionized not-for-profit fundraising strategies,and online charitable crowdfunding is being touted as a valuable alternative for nonprofit organizations and individuals to raise funds for charitable non-profits.This new model of social mutual aid improves the problems of insufficient motivation and slow action of traditional assistance and fills the gaps in the social safety net.Following a patronage model,fundraisers in the charitable crowdfunding market are forced to use compelling stories to capture the attention of donors.As such,conceptualizing a persuasive request narrative to solicit donations from the crowd becomes one of the most urgent issues for fundraisers.Driven by the value of project narratives,the platform,as a bridge linking bilateral markets,also tries to help fundraisers create project narratives through project writing guidelines.Although previous studies have examined the drivers of fundraising performance,they have mainly focused on non-content factors,such as product features,fundraisers’ social networks,and social capital.little is known about whether and how the potential donors are affected by the persuasion of project narration.Meanwhile,the heterogeneous persuasion effect of project narratives is neglected.Additionally,the role of writing guidelines in the whole charitable crowdfunding market has not been well examined.How this platform design affects the writing of project narratives and how it further influences the narratives’ persuasiveness in the online charitable market remains unclear.Based on this,this paper collected granular transaction data from Donors Choose,a leading charitable crowdfunding platform in the United States,and fills existing research gaps by focusing on three research content: the impact of project narratives on fundraising performance,the heterogeneous persuasion effect of project narratives,and the role of platform design(platform writing guidelines)in the online charitable crowdfunding market.First of all,motivated by Aristotle’s theory of persuasion and Daniel Kahneman’s Systems I and II theory,this study examines the relationship between two basic forms of persuasion in project narratives(i.e.,rational appeals and emotional appeals)and project fundraising performance.After addressing endogeneity appeal strategies,the study shows that rational appeal in project narratives facilitates project fundraising performance,while emotional appeal weakens donor contributions.Moreover,this paper relaxes the linear assumption and explores the non-linear relationships between two types of appeals and fundraising performance to gain further insights.The study also conducted randomized experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk(MTurk)to thoroughly investigate the causation and possible mechanisms behind project narration and donor contributions.Next,considering the psychological expectations of potential donors,this paper explores how project and fundraiser heterogeneities moderate the effect of both rational and emotional appeals on project fundraising performance.The findings indicate that project-level attributes(e.g.,fundraising targets)and fundraiser-level characteristics(e.g.,fundraising experiences)tend to weaken the persuasive impact of rational appeals but strengthen the persuasive impact of emotional appeals.Finally,this paper makes full use of Donors Choose’s policy change opportunity on writing guidelines to thoroughly investigate the relationship and underlying mechanism behind platform writing guidelines and donors’ contribution decisions.The empirical results show that the more constraints the guidelines impose on writing,the more likely they are to weaken the persuasiveness of narratives.Inspired by the two theories of Skehan’s limited attentional capacity model and Robinson’s cognition hypothesis,this study specifically focuses on three aspects of narrative complexity(i.e.,linguistic complexity,content complexity,and structural complexity)as mediators to portray the relationship between platform’s writing guideline design,project narrative,and donors’ contributions.The study finds that writing guidelines have a negative impact on linguistic complexity,which in turn diminishes donors’ contribution behavior.Nevertheless,writing guidelines have a positive effect 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,this paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of writing guidelines on fundraisers with different levels of activity.The findings of this study have important implications for charitable crowdfunding stakeholders,including fundraisers,donors,platform operations,and the survival and development of the market.For example,these findings help fundraisers develop compelling project narratives to enhance projects’ crowdfunding performance;give references for donors’ contribution decisions to improve the actual utility of funds;guide the sustainable development of charitable crowdfunding platforms;provide a basis for the government to promote the healthy development of philanthropy.