The Impact of Digital Profile Enrichment on Charitable Giving in Social Networking Sites

In the last decade, social networking platform designers have made notable efforts to harness the power of networks for social good by elevating the prominence of individual donation information. This study investigates how digital profile enrichment that exhibits users’ charitable giving activities could influence users’ decisions about whether to give, how much to give, and whether to disclose contribution sizes. Our analyses are based on a profile enrichment intervention on Weibo, China’s largest social networking site. We find that the profile enrichment to exhibit users’ historical donation counts on social profiles decreased an average user’s odds of donating by 15.5% but increased the contribution size by 2.69%. Strikingly, it increased the odds of revealing contribution sizes by 162%. Clustering analyses further reveal three patterns in response to the profile enrichment: “presenters” (9.7%), who reduced donation frequency but increased contribution sizes and the disclosure of contribution sizes; “restrainers” (47.3%), who reduced their giving; and “conformers” (43%), who increased giving after the profile enrichment. We discuss potential mechanisms by comparing the characteristics of different user clusters to underscore donor heterogeneity and uncover the nuanced impact of such a digital profile enrichment.