Shaped by Social Influence, Guided by Morals: A Personality-Centric Approach to Donation Crowdfunding Through Social Media

Social media is the dynamic engine that transforms ideas into fully funded initiatives, making it an essential component of successful crowdfunding campaigns. One-click social signals, such as “like” on Facebook or “love” on Instagram, are examples of information cues in social media posts that are likely to influence the intention to donate through activation of internalized and non-internalized norms. Therefore, this study proposes and tests a unified research framework linking Big Five personality traits, Informational susceptibility to social influence (ISS), and Moral norms (MN) in predicting the intention to donate through social media platforms. To investigate and test these hypotheses, structural equation modeling (SEM) with SmartPLS 4 was employed on a sample of 399 respondents who had knowledge of social media posts or advertisements related to donation crowdfunding. Respondents were selected through purposive sampling, with the survey disseminated via social media platforms. Findings revealed that agreeableness was the most significant predictor of ISS. Additionally, it has been validated that the intention to donate is considerably affected by ISS and MN. Nevertheless, across genders, no substantial difference was found in the intention pattern. Theoretically, this integration is novel as it links both internalized and non-internalized norms to the intention to donate in social media settings, while also elucidating the role of personality dispositions in shaping users’ susceptibility to informational social influence. Practically, this integration accurately demonstrates the real psychological structure of social media-driven donation crowdfunding.