Abstract
This study compiles the main findings in the field of academic research on pure donation-based crowdfunding (DCF) soliciting monetary contributions for charitable causes. To this purpose, a systematic literature review is conducted, resulting in 92 scientific publications analyzed for the first time in this field of research. The prevailing thematic dimensions and research gaps are identified and discussed. The incipient literature on DCF, with a majority of publications from 2015 onward in the form of empirical articles using quantitative methodologies, focuses on antecedents related to individual donors, organizational promoters as main actors, and online channels and design-related features of campaigns as enablers. However, the effects of DCF on relevant stakeholders (particularly beneficiaries and society in general) remain largely obscure. Based on this analysis, an integrated conceptual framework on DCF is proposed to guide future research. This framework, susceptible of empirical evaluation, allows characterizing the DCF as a distinct and emerging type of philanthropic funding model based on specific and novel antecedents, actors, enablers and effects.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Althoff, T., & Leskovec, J. (2015). Donor retention in online crowdfunding communities: A case study of DonorsChoose.org. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 34–44).
Aprilia, L., & Wibowo, S. S. (2017). The impact of social capital on crowdfunding performance. South East Asian Journal of Management, 11(1), 44–57.
Beaulieu, T., & Sarker, S. (2015). A conceptual framework for understanding crowdfunding. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37(1), 1–31.
Bekkers, R. (2010). Who gives what and when? A scenario study of intentions to give time and money. Social Science Research, 39(3), 369–381.
Bekkers, R., & Wiepking, P. (2011). A literature review of empirical studies of philanthropy: Eight mechanisms that drive charitable giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 40(5), 924–973.
Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T., & Schwienbacher, A. (2013). Individual crowdfunding practices. Venture Capital, 15(4), 313–333.
Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T., & Schwienbacher, A. (2014). Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(5), 585–609.
Belleflamme, P., Omrani, N., & Peitz, M. (2015). The economics of crowdfunding platforms. Information Economics and Policy, 33, 11–28.
Bellio, E., Buccoliero, L., & Fiorentini, G. (2015). Marketing and fundraising through mobile phones: New strategies for nonprofit organizations and charities. In Marca D., & van Sinderen M. (Eds.), ICE-B 2013—10th international conference on E-business, part of the ICETE 2013: 10th international joint conference on E-business and telecommunications.
Beltran, J. F., Siddique, A., Abouzied, A., & Chen, J. (2015). Codo: Fundraising with conditional donations. In UIST 2015—Proceedings of the 28th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 213–222).
Bennett, R. (2005). Antecedents and consequences of website atmosphere in online charity fundraising situations. Journal of Website Promotion, 1(1), 131–152.
Bennett, R. (2009). Impulsive donation decisions during online browsing of charity websites. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 8(2–3), 116–134.
Bergamini, T. P., Navarro, C. L. C., & Hilliard, I. (2017). Is crowdfunding an appropriate financial model for social entrepreneurship? Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal, 23(1), 44–57.
Berliner, L. S., & Kenworthy, N. J. (2017). Producing a worthy illness: Personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis. Social Science and Medicine, 187, 233–242.
Bernardino, S., & Santos, J. F. (2016). Financing social ventures by crowdfunding: The influence of entrepreneurs’ personality traits. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 17(3), 173–183.
Body, A., & Breeze, B. (2016). What are ``unpopular causes’ and how can they achieve fundraising success? International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 21(1), 57–70.
Budak, C., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Measuring the efficiency of charitable giving with content analysis and crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016 (pp. 32–41).
Burtch, G., & Chan, J. (2014). Reducing medical bankruptcy through crowdfunding: Evidence from give forward. In 35th International Conference on Information Systems “Building a Better World tThrough Information Systems”, ICIS 2014.
Byrnes, J. E. K., Ranganathan, J., Walker, B. L. E., & Faulkes, Z. (2014). To crowdfund research, scientists must build an audience for their work. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e110329.
Cao, X., & Jia, L. (2017). The effects of the facial expression of beneficiaries in charity appeals and psychological involvement on donation intentions: Evidence from an online experiment. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 27(4), 457–473.
Casale, D., & Baumann, A. (2015). Who gives to international causes? A sociodemographic analysis of U.S. donors. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 44(1), 98–122.
Castillo, M., Petrie, R., & Wardell, C. (2014). Fundraising through online social networks: A field experiment on peer-to-peer solicitation. Journal of Public Economics, 114, 29–35.
Chen, W., & Givens, T. (2013). Mobile donation in America. Mobile Media and Communication, 1(2), 196–212.
Choi, B., & Kim, M. (2016). Donation via mobile applications: A study of the factors affecting mobile donation application use. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 32(12), 967–974.
Choy, K., & Schlagwein, D. (2015). It affordances and donor motivations in charitable crowdfunding: The “earthship kapita” case. In 23rd European conference on information systems, 2015 (May).
Choy, K., & Schlagwein, D. (2016). Crowdsourcing for a better world on the relation between IT affordances and donor motivations in charitable crowdfunding. Information Technology & People, 29(1, SI), 221–247.
Chung, C., & Moriuchi, E. (2016). The effectiveness of donation advertising: An experimental study for felt ethnicity and messages on in-groups and out-groups. In K. Kim (Ed.) Celebrating America’s Pastimes: Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Marketing? Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science (pp. 745–746). Cham:Springer.
Cockrell, S. R., Meyer, D. W., & Smith, A. D. (2016). Electronic intervention and platforms and their impacts on crowdfunding behavior. International Journal of Business Information Systems, 23(3), 263–286.
Damgaard, M. T., & Gravert, C. (2017). Now or never! The effect of deadlines on charitable giving: Evidence from two natural field experiments. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 66, 78–87.
De Buysere, K., Gajda, O., Kleverlaan, R., & Marom, D. A. (2012). Framework for European crowdfunding. http://www.crowdfundingframework.eu.
De Oliveira, A. C. M., Croson, R. T. A., & Eckel, C. (2011). The giving type: Identifying donors. Journal of Public Economics, 95(5–6, SI), 428–435.
Dragojlovic, N., & Lynd, L. D. (2014). Crowdfunding drug development: The state of play in oncology and rare diseases. Drug Discovery Today, 19(11), 1775–1780.
Du, L., & Li, X. (2016). The influence of micro-charity online comments on the decision making of the donors. In Z. Yang (Ed.), Proceedings of 2016 China Marketing International Conference: Marketing theory and practice.
Eller, A. (2008). Solidarity.com: Is there a link between offline behavior and online donations? Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 11(5), 611–613.
Farnel, M. (2015). Kickstarting trans{*}: The crowdfunding of gender/sexual reassignment surgeries. New Media & Society, 17(2), 215–230.
Ferguson, R., Gutberg, J., Schattke, K., Paulin, M., & Jost, N. (2015). Self-determination theory, social media and charitable causes: An in-depth analysis of autonomous motivation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(3), 298–307.
Flanigan, S. T. (2017). Crowdfunding and diaspora philanthropy: An integration of the literature and major concepts. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 28(2), 492–509.
Fondevila Gascon, J. F., Rodriguez, J. R., Monforte, J. M., Lopez, E. S., & Masip, P. M. (2015). Crowdfunding as a formula for the financing of projects: An empirical analysis. Revista Cientifica Hermes, 14, 24–47.
Forbes, H., & Schaefer, D. (2017). Guidelines for successful crowdfunding. Procedia CIRP, 60, 398–403.
Ge, L., Guo, Z., & Luo, X. (2016). Intermediaries vs peer-to-peer: A study of lenders’ incentive on a donation-based crowdfunding platform. In AMCIS 2016: Surfing the IT innovation wave. Association for Information Systems.
Ghosh, A., & Mahdian, M. (2008). Charity auctions on social networks. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (pp. 1019–1028).
Gleasure, R., & Feller, J. (2016a). Does heart or head rule donor behaviors in charitable crowdfunding markets? International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 20(4), 499–524.
Gleasure, R., & Feller, J. (2016b). Emerging technologies and the democratization of financial services: A metatriangulation of crowdfunding research. Information and Organization, 26(4), 101–115.
Goecks, J., Voida, A., Voida, S., & Mynatt, E. D. (2008). Charitable technologies: Opportunities for collaborative computing in nonprofit fundraising. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 689–698).
Gras, D., Nason, R. S., Lerman, M., & Stellini, M. (2017). Going offline: Broadening crowdfunding research beyond the online context. Venture Capital, 19(3), 217–237.
Gunes, S. (2012). Wisdom of firms versus wisdom of crowds. International Journal of Business, Humanities & Technology, 2(3), 55–60.
Hossain, M., & Oparaocha, G. O. (2017). Crowdfunding: Motives, definitions, typology and ethical challenges. Entrepreneurship Research Journal, 7(2), 1–14.
Hou, J., Zhang, C., & Allen, R. (2017). Understanding the dynamics of the individual donor’s trust damage in the philanthropic sector. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 28, 648–671.
Hsieh, G., Hudson, S. E., & Kraut, R. E. (2011). Donate for credibility: How contribution incentives can improve credibility. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3435–3438).
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68.
Kim, P. H., Buffart, M., & Croidieu, G. (2016a). TMI: Signaling credible claims in crowdfunding campaign narratives. Group and Organization Management, 41(6), 717–750.
Kim, J. G., Kong, H. K., Karahalios, K., Fu, W.-T., & Hong, H. (2016b). The power of collective endorsements: Credibility factors in medical crowdfunding campaigns. In 34th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4538–4549).
Kim, H., & De Moor, L. (2017). The case of crowdfunding in financial inclusion: A survey. Strategic Change, 26(2), 193–212.
Kim, J. G., Vaccaro, K., Karahalios, K., & Hong, H. (2017). Not by money alone: Social support opportunities in medical crowdfunding campaigns. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1997–2009.
Kitchenham, B. (2004). Procedures for performing systematic reviews. Keele University: UK 33(TR/SE-0401), 28.
Korolov, R., Peabody, J., Lavoie, A., Das, S., Magdon-Ismail, M., & Wallace, W. (2015). Actions are louder than words in social media. In S. F. Pei, & J. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (pp. 292–297).
Korolov, R., Peabody, J., Lavoie, A., Das, S., Magdon-Ismail, M., & Wallace, W. (2016). Predicting charitable donations using social media. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 6(1), 31, 1-10.
Kshetri, N. (2015). Success of crowd-based online technology in fundraising: An institutional perspective. Journal of International Management, 21(2), 100–116.
Lacan, C., & Desmet, P. (2017). Motivations for participation and e-WOM among supporters of crowdfunding campaigns. In A. Kavoura, D. Sakas, & P. Tomaras (Eds.), Strategic Innovative Marketing. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics (pp. 315–321). Cham: Springer.
Lee, S., Dewester, D., & Park, S. (2008). Web 2.0 and opportunities for small businesses. Service Business, 2(4), 335–345.
Lee, Y.-H., & Hsieh, G. (2013). Does slacktivism hurt activism? The effects of moral balancing and consistency in online activism. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 811–820).
Lee, U., Song, A., Lee, H.-I., & Ko, M. (2015). Every little helps: Understanding donor behavior in a crowdfunding platform for non-profits. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—Proceedings, 18 (pp. 1103–1108).
Lee, Y.-C., Yen, C.-H., & Fu, W.-T. (2016). Improving donation distribution for crowdfunding: An agent-based model. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9708, 3–12.
Li, Y.-M., & Wu, J.-D. (2016). A social recommendation mechanism for social fundraising. In Pacific Asia conference on information systems, PACIS 2016.
Mano, R. S. (2014). Social media, social causes, giving behavior and money contributions. Computers in Human Behavior, 31, 287–293.
Massolution (2012). The Crowdfunding Industry Report: Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms. Crowdsourcing LLC.
Meer, J. (2014). Effects of the price of charitable giving: Evidence from an online crowdfunding platform. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 103, 113–124.
Meer, J. (2017). Does fundraising create new giving? Journal of Public Economics, 145, 82–93.
Mejova, Y., Weber, I., Garimella, V. R. K., & Dougal, M. C. (2014). Giving is caring: Understanding donation behavior through email. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 1297–1307).
Meyskens, M., & Bird, L. (2015). Crowdfunding and value creation. Entrepreneurship Research Journal, 5(2), 155–166.
Moqri, M., & Bandyopadhyay, S. (2016). Please share! Online word of mouth and charitable crowdfunding. In AMCIS 2016: Surfing the IT innovation wave—22nd Americas conference on information systems.
Neumayr, M., & Handy, F. (2017). Charitable giving: What influences donors’ choice among different causes? VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 30, 783–799.
Nogami, T. (2014). What makes disaster donors different from non-donors? Disaster Prevention and Management, 23(4), 484–492.
Ordanini, A., Miceli, L., Pizzetti, M., & Parasuraman, A. (2011). Crowdfunding: Transforming customers into investors through innovative service platforms. Journal of Service Management, 22(4), 443–470.
O’reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.
Ozdemir, Z. D., Altinkemer, K., De, P., & Ozcelik, Y. (2010). Donor-to-nonprofit online marketplace: An economic analysis of the effects on fund-raising. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(2), 213–242.
Pak, C., & Wash, R. (2017). The rich get richer? Limited learning in charitable giving on donorschoose.org. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media (pp. 172–181).
Panic, K., Hudders, L., & Cauberghe, V. (2016). Fundraising in an interactive online environment. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 45(2), 333–350.
Paulin, M., Ferguson, R. J., Jost, N., & Fallu, J.-M. (2014a). Motivating millennials to engage in charitable causes through social media. Journal of Service Management, 25(3), 334–348.
Paulin, M., Ferguson, R. J., Schattke, K., & Jost, N. (2014b). Millennials, social media, prosocial emotions, and charitable causes: The paradox of gender differences. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 26(4), 335–353.
Perlstein, E. O. (2013). Anatomy of the Crowd4Discovery crowdfunding campaign. Springer Plus, 2(1), 560.
Pitt, L., Keating, S., Bruwer, L., Murgolo-Poore, M., & De Bussy, N. (2002). Charitable donations as social exchange or agapic action on the internet: The case of hungersite.com. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 9(4), 47–61.
Polzin, F., Toxopeus, H., & Stam, E. (2017). The wisdom of the crowd in funding: Information heterogeneity and social networks of crowdfunders. Small Business Economics, 50(2), 251–273.
Reddick, C. G., & Ponomariov, B. (2013). The effect of individuals’ organization affiliation on their internet donations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 42(6), 1197–1223.
Reinstein, D., & Riener, G. (2012). Reputation and influence in charitable giving: An experiment. Theory and Decision, 72(2), 221–243.
Rey-Garcia, M., Liket, K. C., Alvarez-Gonzalez, L. I., & Maas, K. (2017). Back to basics. Revisiting the relevance of beneficiaries for evaluation and accountability in nonprofits. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 27(4), 493–511.
Ryu, S., & Kim, Y.-G. (2016). A typology of crowdfunding sponsors: Birds of a feather flock together? Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 16, 43–54.
Ryu, S., Kim, K., & Kim, Y.-G. (2016). Reward versus philanthropy motivation in crowdfunding behavior. In Pacific Asia conference on information systems.
Sanzo-Perez, M. J., Alvarez-Gonzalez, L. I., & Rey-Garcia, M. (2015). How to encourage social innovations: A resource-based approach. The Service Industries Journal, 35(7–8), 430–447.
Saxton, G. D., & Wang, L. (2014). The social network effect: The determinants of giving through social media. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43(5), 850–868.
Smith, R. W., Faro, D., & Burson, K. A. (2012). More for the many: The influence of entitativity on charitable giving. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(5), 961–976.
Smith, S., Windmeijer, F., & Wright, E. (2015). Peer effects in charitable giving: Evidence from the (Running) field. Economic Journal, 125(585), 1053–1071.
Snyder, J., Mathers, A., & Crooks, V. A. (2016). Fund my treatment! A call for ethics-focused social science research into the use of crowdfunding for medical care. Social Science and Medicine, 169, 27–30.
Solomon, J., Ma, W., & Wash, R. (2015). Don’t wait! How timing affects coordination of crowdfunding donations. In CSCW 2015—Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 547–556).
Steinemann, S. T., Mekler, E. D., & Opwis, K. (2015). Increasing donating behavior through a game for change: The role of interactivity and appreciation. In CHI PLAY 2015—Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer–human Interaction in play (pp. 319–330).
Sura, S., Ahn, J., & Lee, O. (2017). Factors influencing intention to donate via social network site (SNS): From Asian’s perspective. Telematics and Informatics, 34(1), 164–176.
Tan, X., Lu, Y., & Tan, Y. (2016). An examination of social comparison triggered by higher donation visibility over social media platforms. In 2016 international conference on information systems, ICIS 2016.
Tanaka, K. G., & Voida, A. (2016). Legitimacy work: Invisible work in philanthropic crowdfunding. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—Proceedings (pp. 4550–4561).
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D., & Smart, P. (2003). Towards a methodology for developing evidence-informed management knowledge by means of systematic review. British Journal of Management, 14(3), 207–222.
Treiblmaier, H., & Pollach, I. (2006). A framework for measuring people’s intention to donate online. In PACIS 2006—10th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: ICT and Innovation Economy (pp. 808–819).
Tremblay-Boire, J., & Prakash, A. (2017). Will you trust me? How individual American donors respond to informational signals regarding local and global humanitarian charities. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 28(2), 646–672.
van Leeuwen, M. H. D., & Wiepking, P. (2013). National campaigns for charitable causes: A literature review. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 42(2), 219–240.
Wang, B., Lim, E. T. K., & Van Toorn, C. (2016). Gimme money! Designing digital entrepreneurial crowdfunding platforms for persuasion and its social implications. In Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, PACIS 2016—Proceedings (p. 377).
Wash, R. (2013). The value of completing crowdfunding projects. In ICWSM (13).
Wiepking, P. (2008). For the love of mankind. A sociological study on charitable giving (Ph.D. Dissertation). Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Wojciechowski, A. (2009). Models of charity donations and project funding in social networks. In Meersman R., Herrero P., & Dillon T. (Eds.), On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2009 Workshops. Vol. 5872 (pp. 454–463).
Yang, Y., Wang, H. J., & Wang, G. (2016). Understanding crowdfunding processes: A dynamic evaluation and simulation approach. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 17(1), 47–64.
Zhong, Z.-J., & Lin, S. (2017). The antecedents and consequences of charitable donation heterogeneity on social media. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 23(1), 1–11.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Salido-Andres, N., Rey-Garcia, M., Alvarez-Gonzalez, L.I. et al. Mapping the Field of Donation-Based Crowdfunding for Charitable Causes: Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework. Voluntas 32, 288–302 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-020-00213-w
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-020-00213-w