Disentangling the effects of narrative and statistical evidence on donations in charitable crowdfunding: A narrative persuasion perspective

Although charitable crowdfunding has emerged as the de facto avenue for people in need of urgent financial assistance to engage in fundraising, many campaigns suffer from problems of underfunding. Because charitable crowdfunding campaigns rely primarily on project description to attract donations, these project descriptions, in a bid to convince prospective donors, often blend narrative evidence describing what happened to the donatee with statistical evidence encapsulating quantifiable figures to corroborate the narration. Espousing the narrative persuasion theory, this study aims to elucidate how interactions between constituent components of narrative evidence (i.e., imaginable plot, identifiable character, narrative sentiment, and text elaborateness) and statistical evidence affect donations in charitable crowdfunding. Secondary data of 2,054 charity projects was collected from a mainstream charitable crowdfunding platform in China, and multiregression is proposed for data analysis. Findings from this study could advance knowledge of how narrative and statistical evidence jointly influence donations in charitable crowdfunding.