Abstract

Crowdfunding is an emerging industry in the past decades, which proliferates and has attracted an enormous population from the public to be involved in various funding projects in multiple fields such as business entrepreneurship, healthcare, and fintech. Meanwhile, charitable crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter have allowed internet users to provide help and donation to the fundraisers directly. As the year 2020 is surrounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic spreading out the world, the topic of coronavirus relief has surged. Thus, it is worthy of evaluating the crowdfunding campaign's effectiveness during the coronavirus context by making a connection between fundraising activities and coronavirus relief. This paper aims to investigate the effects of various factors affecting a donation-based crowdfunding campaign for coronavirus relief of food donation in the United States and determine the significant factors affecting the campaign's success rate. To achieve this research purpose, secondary data were extensively collected from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe for regression analysis. The sample data was derived from crowdfunding campaigns launched from March 1st, 2020, to May 31st, 2020. During this period, the United States was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with an exponentially surged number of confirmed cases. This paper derives the independent variables that have been examined from previous studies and further applies in the coronavirus context to identify whether these factors are significant influencers to the success of crowdfunding campaigns for coronavirus relief of food donation. The factors being examined include target funding amount, the existence of spelling mistakes, the presence of pictures, video, social network sites, project updates, comments between fundraisers and backers, and links to external websites. That the significant factors contributing to a successful funding project are similar, as identified in previous reward-based and equity crowdfunding studies. On the other hand, several independent variables' effectiveness varied between the normal scenario and the coronavirus context, as such variables demonstrate a much compelling role to attract donors for the coronavirus relief activations. The analysis is valuable and worthy of different viewpoints. First, understanding the donor's motivation and the success features of funding projects is valuable for fundraisers to have a strategic mindset for decision-making criteria when initiating funding projects to attract more donors and the amount of money. Second, because of the lack of literature focusing on examining the success features for donation-based crowdfunding campaigns, this study fills the gap and further focus on the crowdfunding activations in the context of coronavirus food relief in the US. Therefore, this study provides significant insight to understand the dynamics of the donation-based crowdfunding campaign and provides a recommendation to develop coronavirus relief more efficiently.

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