Effect of Framing and Feedback Levels on Funding and Emotional Support in Medical Crowdfunding

Introduction

More recently, online medical crowdfunding – soliciting funds from the internet crowd - has become an increasingly common response to rising healthcare costs, especially in the United States. Medical crowdfunding has been helping patients finance medical expenses and reduce medical bankruptcy (Burtch & Chan, 2018). However, there are a limited number of studies examining the factors that contribute to medical crowdfunding campaign performance. In addition to financial resources, medical crowdfunding also serves as an avenue through which patients receive emotional support, including encouragement and prayers from the Internet crowd. Emotional support is very critical to patient mortality (Penninx et al., 1997; Thong, Kaptein, Krediet, Boeschoten, & Dekker, 2007), how patients cope with their illness (Strine, Chapman, Balluz, & Mokdad, 2008), and adherence to treatment (DiMatteo, 2004).

While prior research in crowdfunding has explored the different drivers of a crowdfunding campaign’s performance (e.g. Cordova, Dolci, & Gianfrate, 2015; Mollick, 2014), and have demonstrated the importance of communication in attracting donations to crowdfunding campaigns (e.g. Wang, Li, Liang, Ye, & Ge, 2018), they have mostly focused on communications used in the entrepreneurial crowdfunding context with little attention paid to charitable contexts like medical crowdfunding. The way in which the message is communicated to the recipient matter and this is especially true when trying to acquire resources from potential benefactors (Chen, Yao, & Kotha, 2009). Moreover, different communication styles matter in different crowdfunding contexts. For instance, Parhankangas and Renko (2017) show that the communication style that matters when crowdfunding for social projects is different from the communication style that matters when crowdfunding for commercial projects. Further, Gleasure & Feller (2016) documents that factors related to communication are the most important predictors of charitable giving to individuals. As such, we expect that communication style may play a significant role in the financial performance of medical crowdfunding campaigns. In addition to fundraising, patients often receive emotional support during their medical crowdfunding campaigns. We also expect that communication style may play a significant role in the amount of emotional support received by patients during their medical crowdfunding campaign.

Against this backdrop, we investigate how the communication style used in a medical crowdfunding campaign relates to its performance in terms of funding level and emotional social support. Particularly, we ask the following question: how does the emotional framing of a medical crowdfunding campaign narrative and the level of feedback communicated to the crowd affect the level of funding and emotional social support received? We investigate the aforementioned question because medical crowdfunding is unique and the willingness to donate may still be limited due to its relative newness and because unlike other types of crowdfunding, there is a huge emotional support component to it. In other forms of crowdfunding, complete success may be just raising the required funding goal. However, in medical crowdfunding, apart from raising the required funding goal, support that helps with the patient’s mortality is very valuable. There are little to no studies exploring factors that drive these dual outcomes of funding and emotional support in medical crowdfunding.

Given the altruistic nature of giving in medical crowdfunding and the fact that scholars have shown that emotions can sometimes motivate people to action more than cognition (Bagozzi & Moore, 1994; Sudhir, Roy, & Cherian, 2016), we argue that the emotional framing of a medical crowdfunding campaign narrative will play a positive role in its overall performance. Further, we argue that a medical crowdfunding campaign whose organizer has a high level of interaction with the crowd through feedbacks will receive more funding and emotional support because the crowd will feel better informed and connected with the patient, their progress, and their medical crowdfunding campaign.