Contrasting the response to past and future oriented appeals for help on donation-based crowdfunding platforms

Rob Gleasure

European Journal of Information Systems, 2024, vol. 33, issue 6, 953-974

Abstract: Despite a large body of research on donation-based crowdfunding platforms, the ways that people appeal for help, and the impact of different appeal types, remain unclear. In particular, it is not clear the extent to which individuals benefit from a temporal orientation on the past, where they can provide personal background, or the future, where they can explain how they will benefit from donors’ help. Building on a novel dataset of 6,282 fundraising campaigns and 44,757 donor comments gathered from a donation-based crowdfunding platform, this study analyzes donors’ financial contributions and expressions of emotional responses in response to past and future oriented appeals. This analysis combines an instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching, natural language processing, and image analysis. The results indicate that verbal responses are similar for past and future oriented appeals, but that future oriented appeals are more effective for fundraising. The results further suggest that, when lower levels of positive affect are used in past oriented appeals, this combination may be linked with more rapidly diminishing financial contributions over time.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0960085X.2023.2295312 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:33:y:2024:i:6:p:953-974

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2023.2295312

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().