Emotions influence donation behavior for disease relief projects on fundraising platforms: Study

The digital era has profoundly changed the way we humans communicate. Today, we can regularly interact in real time with unrelated and unfamiliar people all over the world. Because of this, individuals are now able to engage in prosocial behaviors such as cooperation, empathy, helping, and donating with complete strangers, yet the motivating factors behind these behaviors are not well understood.

Analysis of data generated from fundraising websites suggests that positive emotions lead to increased total donations, while negative emotions lead to increased individual donations.

Fundraising sites rely on information provided on their websites to solicit donations for individuals and organizations that donors may not know. Social scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, recently designed a study to examine how internal emotional cues and external contextual cues influence donation behavior on Tencent Gongyi, a Chinese online fundraising platform.

The research team collected textual and visual data from 1,763 fundraising projects and ran an analysis to assess the emotional state of the faces and text featured in each project. The study explored how emotional cues influence donor behavior and how other factors influence this process.

The researchers concluded that Social Computing Journal.

“Online giving is becoming an increasingly important trend in the charity sector, not only in China but also globally. The impact of emotional cues on giving is not only an important perspective in studying online giving behavior, but also a controversial variable in related research. By further introducing contextual factors, our study explored explanatory variables from project characteristics,” said Lihan He, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management.

The researchers developed several hypotheses about online giving behavior based on several behavioral theories and past research studies. In the first part of the study, they hypothesized that positive emotional stimuli would lead to an increase in total donations, while negative emotional stimuli would lead to an increase in donation amounts from individual donors.

In fact, the study found that projects that used photos that evoked positive emotions raised at least 1,606 RMB more in donations than projects that used photos that evoked negative emotions, and projects that used visual stimuli that evoked negative emotions raised an average of 2.5 RMB more in donations than projects that used photos that evoked more positive emotions.

The research team developed additional hypotheses about how emotional cues might influence donation behavior depending on each project's goal amount, the use of first-person pronouns, the donor's social class, and the type of actor responsible for each project (government organization, grassroots organization, individual, etc.).

Data analysis revealed that projects with lower goal amounts and visually evoked negative emotions raised an average of 2 yuan more per donation than projects with higher goal amounts. The team also found that projects that used more first-person pronouns such as “we” to increase audience empathy raised around 2,000 yuan more in donations when organizers used photos that evoked positive emotional responses, but 2 to 4 yuan more in donations when organizers used photos that evoked negative emotional responses.

The type of actor was highly relevant for fundraising efforts by grassroots-level organizations, with campaigns using photos evoking negative emotions raising approximately 4 yuan more in donations. When individuals functioned as actors, projects using photos evoking positive emotions raised an average of 2,532 more donations than projects using images associated with negative emotions.

The researchers also found that projects that used words like “farmer,” “laborer,” “migrant worker” and “rural” to describe the social class of donors received between 1,990 and 2,797 more donations when they included photos that elicited positive emotional responses.

“The key point is that individuals' online donation behavior is complex and shaped by both internal and external factors, so we need richer data and methods to study this behavior. Previous lab studies have advantages but also limitations. Obtaining more data from the real world and using big data analysis methods can help us further verify existing theories and discover more interesting influencing factors,” He said.

Ultimately, the research team acknowledges that this is just the beginning of their analysis of online giving behavior. “This study is a starting point. Currently, there are not many quantitative studies on non-governmental organizations and charities in China, partly due to limited data availability. We hope to further integrate computational social science methods into this field of research, forge more interdisciplinary collaborations, and discover more interesting and meaningful data,” He said.