Making Charity Crowdfunding Work: An Empirical Study of Project Promotion for Improving Donor Contributions

Seung Jong Lee, Kyung-Pyo Kang, Junghee Lee, Vish Krishnan, JaeHong Park

Abstract: Description A vast majority of charity projects fail to attract donor attention due to an oversupply of projects on crowdfunding platforms. They suffer from a lack of pecuniary incentives, making it particularly challenging to garner donor support. We empirically examine a novel method to gain donor attention by addressing the middle-period malaise effect in charity crowdfunding projects. We suggest that using the concept of top-page promotion helps charitable projects increase their amount of fundraising. We find outreach during less attended and lower performing periods—middle periods— helps gather 24 times more daily donations, outweighing initial period promotion which yields only 11 times more donations. As charity projects struggle to capture donor interest, using our new measure, composite status ratio-to spotlight projects during the lower performing middle periods could offer a crucial new way to overcome middle-period malaise and achieve charitable crowdfunding success across a broader range of social and environmental settings.