The effect of message features on donations in donation-based crowdfunding

Crowdfunding platforms have emerged as a popular method to raise funds for both for-profit and non-profits. Charities often use donation-based crowdfunding platforms to reach out to a wider audience for fundraising campaigns. Key three performance metrics that affect the success of a donation campaign are social media spread of the campaign message, number of donors who decide to donate from seeing the message, and donation amount per donor. This research investigates the effectiveness of negatively framed messages on these three metrics. Analysis of message content of more than 3800 charities on GoFundMe.com via text mining was conducted to form a measure of the negativity of the appeals. Also for each charity, the three performance metrics were collected. Results showed that negatively framed messages led to a greater number of donors and greater sharing of the message on social media, but smaller donation amounts per donor. Implication for charity organizations is that negatively framed messages will be more effective if the goal is to obtain a broad base of support, while positively framed messages will be more effective if the objective is to increase the average donation amount.