How COVID-19 Has Changed Crowdfunding: Evidence From GoFundMe

TL;DR

This study analyzes how COVID-19 has affected crowdfunding success on GoFundMe by examining campaign features, sentiment, and disparities before and after the pandemic's onset, revealing significant changes and disparities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive computational analysis of crowdfunding changes due to COVID-19, including feature importance, causality, and sentiment shifts, using a large dataset and advanced models.

Findings

Significant racial disparity in crowdfunding success.

Increase in sad emotion expression post-COVID-19.

COVID-19 influenced campaign features and success factors.

Abstract

While the long-term effects of COVID-19 are yet to be determined, its immediate impact on crowdfunding is nonetheless significant. This study takes a computational approach to more deeply comprehend this change. Using a unique data set of all the campaigns published over the past two years on GoFundMe, we explore the factors that have led to the successful funding of a crowdfunding project. In particular, we study a corpus of crowdfunded projects, analyzing cover images and other variables commonly present on crowdfunding sites. Furthermore, we construct a classifier and a regression model to assess the significance of features based on XGBoost. In addition, we employ counterfactual analysis to investigate the causality between features and the success of crowdfunding. More importantly, sentiment analysis and the paired sample t-test are performed to examine the differences in crowdfunding campaigns before and after the COVID-19 outbreak that started in March 2020. First, we note that there is significant racial disparity in crowdfunding success. Second, we find that sad emotion expressed through the campaign's description became significant after the COVID-19 outbreak. Considering all these factors, our findings shed light on the impact of COVID-19 on crowdfunding campaigns.