Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
With the recent development of social media, social networking sites have become an important channel for charitable fundraising. Some social networking sites, like Facebook and Weibo, initiate their own charitable campaigns by collaborating with nonprofit organizations. By changing donation visibility, social media platforms can alter the level of social comparison and affect users’ donation patterns. Using individual-level data from a microblogging platform where a donation service is embedded, we investigate how individual donation decisions are influenced by the visibility of donation information. We find that despite the platform designer’s desire to improve fundraising performance, higher visibility of donors’ contributions may have a negative impact on fundraising. We also find that donations made by users’ followees generally have a positive impact on users’ propensity to donate. On the contrary, donations made by the crowd only positively affect a subset of users, while they have a negative impact on other users.
Recommended Citation
Tan, Xue; Lu, Yingda; and Tan, Yong, "An Examination of Social Comparison Triggered by Higher Donation Visibility over Social Media Platforms" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 14.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/Crowdsourcing/Presentations/14
An Examination of Social Comparison Triggered by Higher Donation Visibility over Social Media Platforms
With the recent development of social media, social networking sites have become an important channel for charitable fundraising. Some social networking sites, like Facebook and Weibo, initiate their own charitable campaigns by collaborating with nonprofit organizations. By changing donation visibility, social media platforms can alter the level of social comparison and affect users’ donation patterns. Using individual-level data from a microblogging platform where a donation service is embedded, we investigate how individual donation decisions are influenced by the visibility of donation information. We find that despite the platform designer’s desire to improve fundraising performance, higher visibility of donors’ contributions may have a negative impact on fundraising. We also find that donations made by users’ followees generally have a positive impact on users’ propensity to donate. On the contrary, donations made by the crowd only positively affect a subset of users, while they have a negative impact on other users.