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Top1. Introduction
The global crisis, as the COVID-19 pandemic, is having a strong impact on the society (Siripongdee et al., 2020). Perez-Cepeda and Arias-Bolzmann (2022) indicated that it is important to investigate the sociocultural factors that arise from the interaction between individuals and the society during different global crises, such as what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic. So that, it can be discerned what is meaningful for society, organizations and the academia to know what are the sociocultural factors that emerge in times of global crisis, and thus, based on the sociocultural factors that have appeared in these events, make decisions focused on a specific segment of the community. On the other hand, Schobel (2020) expressed that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life in countless ways around the world, and added, the pandemic has caused a negative economic impact, therefore, many people are in serious financial difficulties. For this reason, some legal entities (companies) and individuals (entrepreneurs) try to solve this financial loss by resorting to various types of subsidies, as crowdfunding.
At the discretion of Simpson et al. (2021), crowdfunding has emerged as a popular complement to raise funds or donations through the use of financial intermediaries, and thus, financially finance projects, products, services and social campaigns. Based on what was stated by these authors, it can be deduced that in times of global crisis, the economic situation of natural and legal persons experiences a lack of financial resources. In addition, it is inferred that natural persons do not have the necessary financial liquidity to promote actions of a different nature, such as those related to the social aspect. To this is added that, it is difficult for new companies or individuals to access fresh financial resources by banking institutions duly regulated by state agencies because the requirements are very demanding to be qualified as a credit subject. It is due to these reasons that, the path that individuals and companies have adopted to seek financing is through crowdfunding, that is, convincing other people or organizations to contribute financial donations to develop projects, products, services and social campaigns with the aim of raising financial funds through the Web platform.
Crowdfunding has become popular worldwide, and is easily accessible through Web platforms (Vidrașcu, 2020). Behl et al. (2021) mentioned that the activities concerning the funds or donations raising through crowdfunding aim to attract contributors to finance a specific cause and in a certain period of time, this process is carried out through digital platforms, and they add, one of the objectives of crowdfunding is to attract individual and group donations in order to collect funds to finance various activities, such as disaster relief actions. It is appropriate to mention that there are multiple digital crowdfunding platforms, but the most important worldwide is GoFundMe (Zenone et al., 2020). In the opinion of Snyder and Cohen (2019) GoFundMe is the most dominant platform when it comes to crowdfunding, this platform specializes in attracting donations for different categories of social purposes, for example, health. It is important to cite what was expressed by Saleh et al. (2021), a big amount of categories for GoFundMe campaigns related to COVID-19 tell poignant stories of the widespread and destructive effect that the global crisis triggered by COVID-19 has had on society. It is important to note that crowdfunding platforms have links to different social networks, for example with Twitter (Hong et al., 2018).
For their part, Jin et al. (2014) stressed that Twitter is especially effective in communicating with audiences that actively participate in social crisis events. This example shows how, through a tweet, it is invoked the use of the crowdfunding platform “Hey guys, I lost my grandmother to Covid and as her next of kin I’m raising money to help pay for funeral expenses. If you don’t mind donating or simply retweeting, below is the GoFundMe page link and my cash app is $TheColby. Thank you all! https://t.co/sbDGcanaz4 @gofundme”. Based on these criteria, the objective of this research is to describe the sociocultural factors related to the group of people who interact with the Twitter user @gofundme in times of global crisis.