JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Medical crowdfunding utilizes the Internet to raise medical funds. It has developed rapidly around the world, however, most medical crowdfunding projects fail to raise target funds. Therefore, a very important research problem that has not received enough attention from the existing literature is which factors affect the success of medical crowdfunding projects.

Objective:

This paper aims to examine the effect of textual features of medical crowdfunding projects on their success rate using 7,281 real project data from four crowdfunding platforms, which are well known in China. In particular, we divided the project text of medical crowdfunding into project title and project details and analysed from two perspectives (existence and extent) to explore their respective impacts.

Methods:

We established a research framework to meet research goals. The process was divided into five main parts. We first collected and cleaned up the data set. Second, determined the research variables. Next, we extracted those variables from the project text. The fourth step was to perform econometric analysis using the hierarchical regression method. Finally, evaluated the results of econometric analysis to extract knowledge.

Results:

We first estimated the existence variables, the results show that in the project title, the presence of patient’s disease and occupation has a positive impact on success rate of fundraising, while the presence of negative emotion words has a negative impact. In the project details, the presence of patient’s occupation and money-related words plays a positive role in fundraising success rate, while the presence of patient’s age, location and positive emotion phrases plays a negative role. Furthermore, we examined the extent of textual features in the project title and project details. The results show that in the project title, too long title length goes against fundraising success rate. The crowdfunding projects described in the project title for patients with younger age or identity of children, students, etc. have a higher success rate. In the project details, the high-frequency money-related and negative words, as well as less number of details narrative and positive words are conducive to succeed in medical crowdfunding. The patients who are young, live in economically developed areas and have a definite occupation can obtain a higher success rate.

Conclusions:

This study collected 7,281 valid projects from four Chinese crowdfunding platforms. It discusses from the perspective of existence and degree which factors in the project text play an important role in the success rate of medical crowdfunding. We found that in addition to project details, the features of project title also have an important impact on the success rate of fundraising. The findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications for medical crowdfunding.