Can Self-Donation Improve the Project Performance? The Impacts of Self-Donation in Charitable Crowdfunding

The low rate of success in online charitable crowdfunding drives project fundraisers to increase the probability of achieving crowdfunding success and improve project performance by self-donation. As self-donation can directly improve the performance measures of charitable projects, it’s expected to attract more donors and donations. However, it also bears the risk of being regarded as unethical and harms donation collection. We investigate the dynamics and influence of self-donation using a large-scale dataset from a leading crowdfunding platform in China. Our results show that charitable projects with self-donation perform well in attracting donations. Self-donation not only improves the probability of achieving success for charitable projects but helps to collect more donations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that self-donation’s impacts varies across the funding cycle. Self-donation at the beginning of the funding cycle shows fundraisers’ commitment to the charitable projects. However, too much self-donation will be harmful.