How to Attract Low Prosocial Funders in Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding research that investigates funding success factors has been increasing. However, existing research shows inconsistent evidence regarding how a prosocial project description affects funding success and largely ignores the issue of matching/mismatching among different factors in affecting funding success. By conducting two experiments, we provide evidence for matching/mismatching effects among funders, project prosocial descriptions, and platform types (donation-based vs. reward-based). While there are no differences for participants with high prosocial motivation across conditions, we find that participants with low prosocial motivation are more likely to contribute higher funding amounts to a project that has a high prosocial description on a donation-based platform, or to a project that has a low prosocial description on a reward-based platform. Thus, this research sheds light on the crowdfunding and prosocial motivation literature.