The relationship between a charity crowdfunding project's contents and donors' participation: An empirical study with deep learning methodologies (original) (raw)
Success Prediction on Crowdfunding with Multimodal Deep Learning
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
We consider the problem of project success prediction on crowdfunding platforms. Despite the information in a project profile can be of different modalities such as text, images, and metadata, most existing prediction approaches leverage only the text dominated modality. Nowadays rich visual images have been utilized in more and more project profiles for attracting backers, little work has been conducted to evaluate their effects towards success prediction. Moreover, meta information has been exploited in many existing approaches for improving prediction accuracy. However, such meta information is usually limited to the dynamics after projects are posted, e.g., funding dynamics such as comments and updates. Such a requirement of using after-posting information makes both project creators and platforms not able to predict the outcome in a timely manner. In this work, we designed and evaluated advanced neural network schemes that combine information from different modalities to study ...
Journal of Research in Emerging Markets, 2021
This study examines the effects of two extreme sentiments (positive vs. negative) and eight types of emotion (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) implied by the wording of the campaign pitch on the outcomes of crowdfunding, and how these effects would vary according to cultural differences (Western vs. Eastern). We analyze a sample drawn from 17,289 crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter in the "design" and "technology" category to examine how feelings can affect the success, the number of backers, and pledged amounts for crowdfunding projects. We find three regularities by using propensity score match to map Western campaigns to Eastern ones. First, negative sentiment is adversely associated with the success probability but positively related to backer count in the Eastern culture subsample. Second, specific emotions have a larger impact on crowdfunding success among Western culture projects. Third, the statistical significance a...
Environmental Development
The need for stability in the economy for world development has been a challenge due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the increase of natural disasters and their aftermath have been increasing causing damages to infrastructure, the economy, livelihood, and lives in general. This study aimed to determine factors affecting the intention to donate for victims of Typhoon Odette, a recent super typhoon that hit the Philippines leading to affect 38 out of 81 provinces of the most natural disaster-prone countries. Determining the most significant factor affecting the intention to donate may help in increasing the engagement of donations among other people to help establish a more stable economy to heighten world development. With the use of deep learning neural network, a 97.12% accuracy was obtained for the classification model. It could be deduced that when donors understand and perceive both severity and vulnerability to be massive and highly damaging, then a more positive intention to donate to victims of typhoons will be observed. In addition, the influence of other people, the holiday season when the typhoon happened, and the media as a platform have greatly contributed to heightening the intention to donate and control over the donor's behavior. The findings of this study could be applied and utilized by government agencies and donation platforms to help engage and promote communication among donors. Moreover, the framework and methodology considered in this study may be extended to evaluate intention, natural disasters, and behavioral studies worldwide.
Donation Behavior in Online Micro Charities: An Investigation of Charitable Crowdfunding Projects
Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017), 2017
Charitable crowdfunding is a burgeoning online micro charity paradigm where fund seekers request micro donations from a large group of potential funders. Despite micro charities have gone digital for more than a decade, our knowledge on individuals' donation behavior in online micro charities (e.g., charitable crowdfunding) remains limited. To fill this gap, this study develops a model that explains individuals' donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding. Our model was tested using data collected from 205 individuals who have read charitable crowdfunding projects. The results reveal that empathy and perceived credibility of charitable crowdfunding jointly determine a funder's intention to donate money. Furthermore, website quality and project content quality positively influence both empathy and perceived credibility. Also noteworthy is that initiator reputation is positively related to perceived credibility while project popularity is positively associated with empathy. The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of individuals' donation behavior in online micro charities.
IMSA, 2024
In the ever-evolving landscape of crowdfunding, the ability to predict project success is paramount for investors and stakeholders. In this paper, we employ advanced machine learning techniques to analyze crowdfunding data and identify key predictors of project outcomes. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset sourced from Kickstarter, we preprocess the data, apply cutting-edge machine learning models, and evaluate performance using a range of metrics. Notably, the Random Forest model emerges as the top performer, achieving the highest performance across all metrics, including an impressive AUC of 99.90%, accuracy of 99.86%, precision of 99.60%, recall of 100%, and F1-Score of 99.80%. Additionally, we introduce novel Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to provide deeper insights into crowdfunding project dynamics. Our analysis reveals actionable insights into project success factors, empowering stakeholders to make informed decisions and maximize investment returns. Through rigorous experimentation and visualization, including dashboards, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in predicting crowdfunding project outcomes with high accuracy and precision. This paper not only contributes to the growing body of research in crowdfunding analytics but also offers practical implications for investors and entrepreneurs navigating the dynamic crowdfunding landscape.
Does Heart or Head Rule Donor Behaviors in Charitable Crowdfunding Markets?
International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 2016
Crowdfunding has matured into a meaningful online marketplace, both for traditional e-commerce activities and for charitable fundraising. For charities, crowdfunding presents novel donation behaviors, including those where donors may proactively seek out causes and give (often anonymously) to help others with whom they share little social connectivity. Understanding these behaviors is challenging compared to traditional fundraising behaviors, where charitable giving is partly explained by factors such as guilt avoidance, reciprocity, image, vicarious enjoyment, and group-level benefits. This suggests that some subset of charitable motivations is brought uniquely into focus in crowdfunding marketplaces. These marketplaces are often inhabited by fundseeking individuals and larger formal organizations. This adds further complexity, given that donors traditionally perceive and interact differently with charitable organizations and less formal fundraising entities. This study explores donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding based on the distinction between "pure altruism" and "warm glow" motivations. We offer a discriminatory model of donation behaviors toward individuals and organizations, which is then tested in a large-scale field study of Razoo.com. Findings suggest that donations to organizations are more influenced by outcome-related factors, such as fundraising targets and the likelihood of meeting that target, while donations to individuals are more influenced by interaction-related factors, such as the level of dialogue around a campaign.
What Contributes to a Crowdfunding Campaign's Success? Evidence and Analyses from GoFundMe Data
Journal of Social Computing, 2021
Researchers have attempted to measure the success of crowdfunding campaigns using a variety of determinants, such as the descriptions of the crowdfunding campaigns, the amount of funding goals, and crowdfunding project characteristics. Although many successful determinants have been reported in the literature, it remains unclear whether the cover photo and the text in the title and description could be combined in a fusion classifier to better predict the crowdfunding campaign's success. In this work, we focus on the performance of the crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe across a wide variety of funding categories. We analyze the attributes available at the launch of the campaign and identify attributes that are important for each category of the campaigns. Furthermore, we develop a fusion classifier based on the random forest that significantly improves the prediction result, thus suggesting effective ways to make a campaign successful.
Predictive models for charitable giving using machine learning techniques
PLOS ONE
Private giving represents more than three fourths of all U.S. charitable donations, about 2% of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Private giving is a significant factor in funding the nonprofit sector of the U.S. economy, which accounts for more than 10% of total GDP. Despite the abundance of data available through tax forms and other sources, it is unclear which factors influence private donation, and a reliable predictive mechanism remains elusive. This study aims to develop predictive models to accurately estimate future charitable giving based on a set of potentially influential factors. We have selected several factors, including unemployment rate, household income, poverty level, population, sex, age, ethnicity, education level, and number of vehicles per household. This study sheds light on the relationship between donation and these variables. We use Stepwise Regression to identify the most influential variables among the available variables, based on which predictive models are developed. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and machine learning techniques, including Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) are used to develop the predictive models. The results suggest that population, education level, and the amount of charitable giving in the previous year are the most significant, independent variables. We propose three predictive models (MLR, ANN, and SVR) and validate them using 10-fold cross-validation method, then evaluate the performance using 9 different measuring criteria. All three models are capable of predicting the amount of future donations in a given region with good accuracy. Based on the evaluation criteria, using a test data set, ANN outperforms SVR and MLR in predicting the amount of charitable giving in the following year.
HCI 2018, 2018
Creating a good crowdfunding campaign is difficult. By understanding why people contribute to crowdfunding campaigns we can make campaigns better and raise more money. Crowdfunding websites allow entrepreneurs to make a pitch, which is watched by potential funders. This article describes a pilot of an experiment that measures how people react to both successful and unsuccessful pitches. In particular we are interested in emotional reactions and trust reactions. Unexpectedly, failed campaigns were watched more and were judged to have higher integrity. Perceived ability seemed to be the best predictor of a campaign's success. We hope to explore this subject in more depth with further experiments.
Discovering Critical Factors in the Content of Crowdfunding Projects
Algorithms
Crowdfunding can simplify the financing process to raise large amounts of money to complete projects for startups. However, improving the success rate has become one of critical issues. To achieve this goal, fundraisers need to create a short video, attractive promotional content, and present themselves on social media to attract investors. Previous studies merely discussed project factors that affect crowdfunding success rates. However, from the available literature, relatively few studies have studied what elements should be involved in the project content for the success of crowdfunding projects. Consequently, this study aims to extract the crucial factors that can enhance the crowdfunding project success rate based on the project content description. To identify the crucial project content factors of movie projects, this study employed two real cases from famous platforms by using natural language processing (NLP) and feature selection algorithms including rough set theory (RST)...
The Common Donor's Motive: An Online Field Experiment
International Journal of Indian Psychology, 2021
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations came forward to alleviate the sudden financial and primary needs of the dependent and disadvantaged population via online fundraisers; where the appeal is crucial in encouraging people to engage in prosocial behavior. Studies about social responsibility norm and the Empathy Joy hypothesis provisionally prove their role in enhancing prosocial behavior. We studied the difference in online donating behavior as a function of the motive through a field experiment. We circulated three kinds of messages on social media: 1-appealing to egoistic motive 2appealing to social responsibility 3-information only appeal (control) to evaluate their comparative effect on donating. The data suggests that underlying motivation had no influence on the choice of donation or the amount donated. The paper provides suggestions for organizers of fundraising campaigns based on past research findings and results of the current study.
Predicting Fundraising Performance in Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns Using Machine Learning
Electronics, 2021
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has flooded public health organizations around the world, highlighting the significance and responsibility of medical crowdfunding in filling a series of gaps and shortcomings in the publicly funded health system and providing a new fundraising solution for people that addresses health-related needs. However, the fact remains that medical fundraising from crowdfunding sources is relatively low and only a few studies have been conducted regarding this issue. Therefore, the performance predictions and multi-model comparisons of medical crowdfunding have important guiding significance to improve the fundraising rate and promote the sustainable development of medical crowdfunding. Based on the data of 11,771 medical crowdfunding campaigns from a leading donation-based platform called Weibo Philanthropy, machine-learning algorithms were applied. The results demonstrate the potential of ensemble-based machine-learning algorithms in the predictio...
Artificial Intelligence and the Future for Charities
International Journal of Non-Profit Sector Empowerment, 2023
Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our daily lives and shaping the future of work, communication, and the economy. The charity sector is not an exception. AI is a wide set of technologies that mimic human intelligence and can be used in various ways, such as speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. It is changing the charity sector, where it is being used to offer online advice. Chatbots, which use "natural language processing (NLP)" and "machine learning (ML)," are being used to talk to people about climate change, homelessness, and other social issues (Green, 2021). This article explores the utilisation of AI in the charity sector, examining its benefits, potential risks, and challenges, as well as predicting its future prospects.
Measuring the Efficiency of Charitable Giving with Content Analysis and Crowdsourcing
2016
In the U.S., individuals give more than 200 billion dollars to over 50 thousand charities each year, yet how people make these choices is not well understood. In this study, we use data from CharityNavigator.org and web browsing data from Bing toolbar to understand charitable giving choices. Our main goal is to use data on charities' overhead expenses to better understand efficiency in the charity marketplace. A preliminary analysis indicates that the average donor is "wasting" more than 15% of their contribution by opting for poorly run organizations as opposed to higher rated charities in the same Charity Navigator categorical group. However, charities within these groups may not represent good substitutes for each other. We use text analysis to identify substitutes for charities based on their stated missions and validate these substitutes with crowd-sourced labels. Using these similarity scores, we simulate market outcomes using web browsing and revenue data. With ...
The Rich Get Richer? Limited Learning in Charitable Giving on donorschoose.org
2017
Crowdfunding websites allow anyone to raise money through many financial contributions from the 'crowd.' One commonly cited social benefit of crowdfunding is the democratization of access to capital. The degree of the democratization depends on how much ordinary people, who may not have financial access before crowdfunding, receive funding. Since many crowdfunders start out as a non-professional, learning is a critical factor for them to be successful. However, it is not clear that initially unsuccessful crowdfunders learn enough to prevent the rich get richer phenomenon. By analyzing a large dataset from donorschoose.org, we found that successful crowdfunders appear to learn more while unsuccessful crowdfunders frequently give up on crowdfunding. This result calls for design solutions that help crowdfunders learn from failure better.
The impact of public service motivation on fundraising - The emotional charity marketing flaw
2019
Many academics criticize charity appeals that focus on negative emotions to drive donations. With UK citizens being statistically more likely to donate to save a dog's life over a refugee’s life, understanding how emotions impact charitable giving may help non-profits match their marketing appeals to motivations of the donor. Consequently, this study examines the underlying motivations of individuals through public service motivation theory and investigates if it leads to donations when beneficiaries are dogs or refugees. Furthermore, we draw upon positive emotions to see if they influence the relation between motivation and donations. Using a vignette web-based survey, 328 respondents had the option to spend money on a dog rescue charity, a Syrian refugee charity or decide to withhold donations entirely. The study found a positive relation between public service motivation and monetary giving. However, the relations differed when individual public service motivation dimensions ...
The emotional consequences of donation opportunities
The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2016
Charities often circulate widespread donation appeals, but who is most likely to donate and how do appeals impact the well-being of individual donors and non-donors, as well as the entire group exposed to the campaign? Here we investigate three factors that may influence donations (recent winnings, the presence of another person, and matched earnings) in addition to the changes in affect reported by individuals who donate in response to a charitable opportunity and those who do not. Critically, we also investigate the change in affect reported by the entire sample to measure the net impact of the donation opportunity. Results reveal that people winning more money donate a smaller percentage to charity, and the presence of another person does not influence giving. In addition, large donors experience hedonic boosts from giving, and the substantial fraction of large donors translates to a net positive influence on well-being for the entire sample.
VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2020
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by International Society for Third-Sector Research. This eoffprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Analysis and Outcome Prediction of Crowdfunding Campaigns
International Journal of Information Retrieval Research
Humongous volumes of data are being generated every minute by individual users as well as organizations. This data can be turned into a valuable asset only if it is analyzed, interpreted and used for improving processes or for benefiting users. One such source that is contributing huge data every year is a large number of web-based crowd-funding projects. These projects and related campaigns help ventures to raise money by acquiring small amounts of funding from different small organizations and people. The funds raised for crowdfunded projects and hence, their success depends on multiple elements of the project. The current work predicts the success of a new venture by analysis and visualization of the existing data and determining the parameters on which success of a project depends. The prediction of a project’s outcome is performed by application of machine learning algorithms on crowd-funding data stored in the NoSQL database, MongoDB. The results of this work can prove benefic...
A Study of Donation-Based Crowd Funding Platforms
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Analysis
Persuasion is the process of communication in which a person wants to create an influence to induce certain behaviour sends a persuasive message to the other individual with the aim of generating an impact on the recipient's attitude. The power of decision making, however, is at the disposal of the recipient. Various technologies are used by the donation based crowd funding platforms to persuade the website visitors to make donations for certain causes. The main objective of the study was to focus on the specific factors that are used by the donation based crowd funding platforms to persuade the prospective donors to make donations to specific campaigns. Exploration methods were used to obtain the necessary data through online questionnaires. The questionnaire mainly included close ended questions where most of the questions were designed for the people who have donated using crowd funding platforms to react on a Likert scale of 5 (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree). Total sam...