The Influence of Signals on Donation Crowdfunding Campaign Success during COVID-19 Crisis

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 March 1st with 134 confirmed COVID-19 infected cases to July 29th 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.

An empirical investigation of repeated donations on crowdfunding platforms during COVID-19

“…The volume of donations they receive comes primarily from individuals, while corporate houses dominate the donations’ worth. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of individual donors in supporting people’s financial and economic well-being (Behl et al, 2021a , 2021b , 2021c ; Ho et al, 2021 ; Xiao & Yue, 2021 ). While earlier studies have discussed this in DM, recent studies have also highlighted its importance in relation to COVID-19.…”

Campaigning Zakat on Social Media: The Role of Message Strategies in the Decision to Pay Zakat

“…It can be said that the reach of DDW's social media is not as wide as in previous studies that have been successful in their campaigns and marketing. Han-Chiang Ho et al, (2021) revealed that comments, followers, and shares on social media influence the success of crowdfunding campaigns. This is in line with Abishek Bhati and Diarmuid McDonnell (2020), which revealed that the number of likes on Facebook is positively related to fundraising success.…”

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

“…We would expect similar effects of a quick response in COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns, and control for the possible impact of Starting month accordingly. Second, given that Hubei was the epicenter of the outbreak, we employ Supported area to control for the geographical effect (Mollick, 2014 ; Ho et al, 2021 ). Finally, following prior research (Liu et al, 2021 ; Mollick, 2014 ), we control for the Fundraising goal .…”

“…However, to date very little research has attempted to apply signaling theory to pure donation-based charitable crowdfunding. Ho et al ( 2021 ) discussed how signals originating from campaign- and fundraiser-level attributes as well as from donor–fundraiser interactions influenced the success of food-aid crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Attempts were also made to examine the success factors of charitable crowdfunding with a reward-based feature (Bukhari et al, 2019 ) and medical crowdfunding (Chen et al, 2022 ) from a signaling theory perspective.…”

“…Finally, despite the increasingly wide use of charitable crowdfunding in emergency situations, empirical studies on its success factors remain relatively scarce, and attention has often been given to campaigns launched on a single platform in the United States (Mejia et al, 2019 ; Ho et al, 2021 ). Over the past few years, online crowdfunding has played a crucial role in emergency relief in China (FIDC, 2021 ).…”