Does Relational Endorsement Matter For Online Medical Crowdfunding? An Empirical Investigation On Offline And Online Relationships

Online medical crowdfunding has become a powerful tool for patients to raise funds.Crowdfunding campaigns can use two methods to attract donors:endorsements and updates.Based on the identifiable victim effect theory,endorsement can increase the identifiability of fundraising activities and promote donations;in the existing literature on signal theory and transparency theory,updates will be used as quality signals to increase the credibility of fundraising activities or directly increase the transparency of the project,thereby promoting donations.This article examines the impact of these two fundraising tools on the amount of donations and the interaction between them.The results of econometric analysis using 1,557 online medical crowdfunding projects show that both endorsements and updates will have a positive impact on the amount of donations.The increase of endorsers from online social networks or the increase of endorsers from offline social networks will bring more donations to the project,and the endorsement of online social relations is more effective than offline social relations.Similarly,the timeliness of updates and negative emotions will also promote donations.In addition,the timeliness of updates and the existence of negative emotions have a certain weakening effect on the positive impact of endorsement on the amount of fundraising.This finding confirms our hypothesis about the existence of information overload in online medical crowdfunding.Our research has enriched the literature in the field of online medical crowdfunding and expanded the application scenarios of the identifiable victim effect and information overload theory.It has certain management implications for fundraising sponsors,donors and fundraising platforms.