An Empirical Study on the Promotion of Donation Performance of Non-profit Organizations-Emotional Influence on the Willingness to Donate

Abstract

With the development of social economy and the high popularity of the Internet, the share of network donations in non-profit organizations is also increasing year by year. But how to increase people's willingness to donate and thus improve the performance of online fundraising has not been studied at home and abroad. Based on past research, this study uses a two-factor experimental design to explore the influence of induced emotions on donors' willingness to donate. The results show that both the emotions induced by fund-raising materials and the nonmaterial-induced emotions have a significant impact on people's fund-raising intentions. Specifically, when fund-raising materials contain strong negative emotions (such as individual donations for a serious disease), people need to be induced by positive emotions. Increase the willingness to donate; when fundraising materials contain weak negative emotions (such as fundraising for out-of-school children), willingness to donate can be increased by exerting positive or negative non-material emotions. This result provides a practical approach to improve the donation performance of non-profit companies at the micro level.

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

“…This phenomenon implies the existence of (1) a possible non-linear relationship, (2) differential effects of expressing dissimilar types of negative emotions or (3) heterogeneous effects in different online charitable crowdfunding types. Second, previous research has largely treated negative emotions as a whole (Wang, 2018); thus, how expressions of different types of negative emotions (e.g. sadness, anxiety and fear) influence online charitable crowdfunding efficacy remains unclear.…”

“…While previous research provides rich insights, the majority of crowdfunding studies have solely examined an overall concept of negative emotion; however, negative emotions comprise a multitude of emotion types (Wang, 2018), including sadness, anxiety and fear. The inconsistent findings in the literature may be due to the different roles of these negative emotions in attracting donations.…”