Investigating the impacts of fundraisers’ self-donations on donors’ contribution in charitable crowdfunding: A warm glow perspective

The challenge of motivating potential donors to contribute is the primary hurdle to the success of online charitable crowdfunding. Anchoring on warm glow theory, we investigate how fundraisers’ self-donations influence donors to contribute to online charitable crowdfunding projects and examine the underlying mechanism through activating potential donors’ warm glow feeling. Using a large-scale dataset from a leading crowdfunding platform in China and a laboratory experiment, we find that fundraisers’ self-donations have a significant positive impact on potential donors’ contributions through developing their warm glow feeling. Our results show that charitable crowdfunding projects with fundraisers’ self-donations perform better in attracting donations from donors. Fundraisers’ self-donations not only improve the probability of success for charitable crowdfunding projects but also facilitates the collection of additional donations. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.