Research On The Persuasive Effect Of Medical Crowdfunding Project Appeals On Users' Donation Willingness

The medical crowdfunding platform provides efficient and convenient fund-raising channels for the help-seekers,facilitates the patients to tell and spread their disease experiences and charity appeals,and helps many low-income patients with serious diseases to solve the problem of medical expenses,which is increasingly favored by people.For medical help seekers,it is especially important to ensure that their charity appeals can impress potential donors.What kind of information can be released in limited space to promote the success of crowdfunding projects is a big problem worth exploring.This paper draws upon Aristotle's theory of persuasion to explore the factors affecting the donation willingness of medical crowdfunding platforms users from three aspects: pathos(emotional appeals),logos(rational appeals),and ethos(credibility appeals).This paper will focus on the message framing of the project content,which emphasizes the positive or negative consequences of adopting or not adopting a specific behavior.Gain-framed message usually represents the revenue generated by taking a certain action,while loss-framed message usually represents the cost of not taking the required action.In this study,gain-frame and loss-frame are used as emotional appeals.In addition,the length of the text,the number of images and the number of health-related professional words which reflect the information quality in medical crowdfunding project are taken as the rational appeals,and the credibility of the project as credibility appeal.This paper consists of three studies.The first two studies use the experimental method to design four groups of situational questionnaires,which are designed to explore the relationship between the rational appeal,the emotional appeal and the credibility appeal,and the influence of the three on donation willingness of project browsers.Study 2 further explores on the basis of Study 1 and considers the coexistence of gain and loss frames.Study3 crawls the project content of Qingsongchou on Weibo,extracts the relevant variables after quantitative processing,constructs the econometric model,and tests the proposed assumptions by objective data analysis.Study 3 is also a further verification of some conclusions of firsttwo experimental studies,but also to find the relationship between some other variables.Through the text analysis of medical crowdfunding projects,we can better identify the factors that affect the donation willingness.The results of Study 1 and Study 2 confirmed that the project's information quality(rational appeal),massage framing(emotional appeal)and credibility(credibility appeal)significantly affect the donation willingness,but the presentation order of message framing(gain-frame first /loss-frame first)has no significant impact on donation willingness.In Study 3,by crawling the real project data of Qingsongchou,we not only verified some conclusions of the first two studies,but also found more factors that affect users' donation willingness.For example,the target amount,the number of real name authenticators,and the fund-raising dynamics have a significant positive impact on users' donation willingness,while the length of the project title has a significant negative impact on donation willingness.This study has practical enlightenment and guiding significance on how the platform can promote the donors' donation willingness and how medical help-seekers can write charity appeals.It also enriches and expands the application of Aristotle's theory of persuasion in medical crowdfunding research.