The Effects of Moral Framing on Online Fundraising Outcomes: Evidence from GoFundMe Campaigns

2025-05-16

AI Summary

This study investigates how moral framing—specifically care, fairness, and loyalty—impacts fundraising effectiveness on GoFundMe. Method: Leveraging a dataset of 14,088 real-world campaigns, we integrate moral dictionary–driven NLP text analysis with multidimensional regression modeling to quantify framing effects on donation outcomes. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence that negative moral framing (emphasizing harm or injustice) significantly increases total donations and user engagement (e.g., comments, shares) but reduces average donation size. Loyalty framing consistently and robustly boosts donor count and private message volume across all campaign categories, exhibiting broad generalizability. Emergency-related campaigns demonstrate heightened sensitivity to moral framing overall. Collectively, findings reveal a “double-edged sword” effect of moral narratives: while certain framings enhance reach and participation, they may concurrently dilute donation depth. These results offer actionable, ethics-informed strategies for optimizing online charitable communication.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Accountability, Interpretability & Explainability

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems

Abstract

This study examines the impact of moral framing on fundraising outcomes, including both monetary and social support, by analyzing a dataset of 14,088 campaigns posted on GoFundMe. We focused on three moral frames: care, fairness, and (ingroup) loyalty, and measured their presence in campaign appeals. Our results show that campaigns in the Emergency category are most influenced by moral framing. Generally, negatively framing appeals by emphasizing harm and unfairness effectively attracts more donations and comments from supporters. However, this approach can have a downside, as it may lead to a decrease in the average donation amount per donor. Additionally, we found that loyalty framing was positively associated with receiving more donations and messages across all fundraising categories. This research extends existing literature on framing and communication strategies related to fundraising and their impact. We also propose practical implications for designing features of online fundraising platforms to better support both fundraisers and supporters.

Problem

• Impact of moral framing on online fundraising outcomes
• Effectiveness of negative framing in attracting donations
• Positive association of loyalty framing with donations

Innovation

• Analyzed moral framing in GoFundMe campaigns
• Focused on care, fairness, and loyalty frames
• Proposed platform features for better fundraising