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

Abstract

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.