Individual Fundraising in Online Charitable Giving

Online individual fundraising has been a prominent component of online charitable giving due to the low cost of online solicitation. While studies of offline charity have shown that solicitation under peer pressure leads to higher donation, it is unclear whether this fundraising effect still holds online given several significant differences between offline and online settings. In this paper, we first examine whether online individual fundraising donors give more and what factors moderate such an effect. We found that in general this is true: An individual fundraising donor gives on average ¥6 more than an organic donor. However, this effect is overturned for anonymous donors, where the organic donors actually give more than those in individual fundraising. In addition, the effect varies along the life cycle of a project or individual fundraising, with the early and later donors showing greater effect than those coming in the middle of the life cycle. Next, we examine the interaction between individual fundraising and organic donation through information sharing. Counter-intuitively, we found that blocking organic donors' access to individual fundraising will increase donations for most projects, with the aggregated gain across projects in our sample to be 4.6%. We provide explanations for our findings