JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Recent studies have analyzed the factors that contribute to the variations in the success of crowdfunding campaigns for a specific cancer type, but little is known about the influential factors among crowdfunding campaigns for multiple cancers.

Objective:

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between project features and the success of cancer crowdfunding campaigns, and to determine whether text features affect campaigns’ success for various cancers.

Methods:

Using cancer-related crowdfunding projects on the GoFundMe website, we transformed textual descriptions in the campaigns into structured data using natural language processing techniques. Next, we utilized penalized logistic regression and correlation analyses to examine the influence of project features and text features on fundraising project outcomes. Last, we examined the influence of the sentiment of the campaign descriptions on crowdfunding success using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software.

Results:

Campaigns were significantly more likely to be successful (P <.05) if they featured a lower target amount for fundraising, a higher number of previous donations, agency (versus individual) organizers, project pages containing updates, and project pages containing comments from readers. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the length of the text and the amount of funds raised. In addition, more spelling mistakes negatively affected the funds raised (P <.05).

Conclusions:

Difficult-to-treat cancers and high-mortality cancers tend to trigger empathy from potential donors, which increases the funds raised. There were gender differences in the effects of emotional words in the text on the amount of funds raised. For cancers that typically occur in women links between emotional words used and the amount of funds raised were weaker than for cancers typically occurring among men. Clinical Trial: N/A