Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early US COVID‐19 pandemic

During the early months of COVID‐19, many people in the US turned to charitable crowdfunding to seek and provide assistance. Little is known about the needs, hopes or experiences that motivated US pandemic crowdfunding and how these were correlated with campaign success. This study uses a mixed‐meth...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sociology of health & illness 2023-02, Vol.45 (2), p.298-316
Main Authors: Kenworthy, Nora, Jung, Jin‐Kyu, Hops, Emily
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beneficiaries
Campaigns
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
Crises
Crowdfunding
Crowdsourcing - methods
digital media
Donations
Healthcare Financing
Humans
Motivation
Pandemics
safety nets
social suffering
Welfare benefits
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Summary:During the early months of COVID‐19, many people in the US turned to charitable crowdfunding to seek and provide assistance. Little is known about the needs, hopes or experiences that motivated US pandemic crowdfunding and how these were correlated with campaign success. This study uses a mixed‐methods data analysis of a randomised cluster sample of 919 US GoFundMe campaigns during the first 7 months of the pandemic. Overall, most campaigns performed poorly, and 38% got no donations at all. The largest proportion of campaigns aimed to address individual, acute financial struggles, often arising from considerable challenges accessing or qualifying for government assistance. These campaigns, as well as those involving campaigners and beneficiaries of colour, tended to be least successful. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed three key crowdfunding motivations that reflect individualistic, agentive responses to the pandemic: struggling, helping and adapting. These motivations reveal a shift away from social suffering and collective mobilisation and towards largely individualised efforts of survival as digital crowdfunding becomes a key domain of crisis response. Crowdfunding platforms are playing an increasingly important role in mediating and influencing individual and collective responses to crisis, which has important political ramifications for how societies perceive and address health emergencies.
ISSN:0141-9889
1467-9566
DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.13568