Does transparency facilitate the fundraising capacity of public welfare crowdfunding?An empirical examination on Weibo
Abstract
Purpose
Information opacity in donation crowdfunding activities has constrained the healthy development of China’s public welfare activities. Addressing the trust crisis and enhancing public engagement warrants further investigation. This study aims to uncover the moderating effect of activity transparency by utilizing data from 1,029 donation crowdfunding projects on the Sina Weibo Public Welfare Social Platform. In this way, we seek to elucidate the impact of donation crowdfunding events on fundraising ability.
Design/methodology/approach
This study selects text complexity, number of supporters, creator experience, and social capital as explanatory variables; innovatively selects the number of updates of online crowdfunding activities and total reading volume as moderating variables; selects the number of shares of crowdfunding activities as a mediating variable; and constructs a moderated mediation multiple regression model for fundraising ability.
Findings
Our findings indicate that independent variables, such as text complexity, number of supporters, and social capital, can significantly affect the dependent variable, fundraising ability. However, creator experience does not influence fundraising ability. Furthermore, social interaction has a mediating effect, whereas activity transparency has a reverse moderating effect. These results indicate that social interaction can enhance the fundraising ability of donation crowdfunding events. However, with an increase in information transparency, the fundraising ability of social media decreases.
Originality/value
The originality of this research is in clarifying the internal factors affecting fundraising ability through induction, making bold assumptions, and focusing on how social media’s effective interaction and activity transparency will affect public welfare crowdfunding fundraising ability.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 20&ZD060). The authors would also like to express appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their very helpful comments that improved the paper.
Citation
Liang, L., Xie, J., Ren, J., Wang, J. and Wang, C. (2024), "Does transparency facilitate the fundraising capacity of public welfare crowdfunding?An empirical examination on Weibo", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-08-2023-0572
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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