Factors impacting donors' intention to donate to charitable crowd-funding projects in China: a UTAUT-based model

摘要

The new and increasingly popular tool of crowd-funding is widely used by non-profit organizations in China to raise money online for their charitable projects. In order to use this tool effectively, it is essential to understand donors' motivations for supporting charitable projects. This study investigates the impact of performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), facilitating conditions (FC), sense of trust, and experience expectation on donors' intention to donate to charitable crowd-funding projects, using a research model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model. Empirical data were collected through a survey, and structural equation modeling was used to analyze 316 responses from users of the Tencent charitable crowd-funding platform in China. The results indicate that SI, sense of trust, EE, and PE significantly affect donors' intention to donate to charitable crowd-funding projects. The impact of FC and experience expectation on donors' intention is also positive; however, it is not very strong. Finally, this paper presents suggestions for how to increase users' intention to donate money on charitable crowd-funding platforms.