The Role of Crowdfunding in Philanthropy: Donor Motivations From a Self‐Determination Theory and Cultural Lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study examines how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations influence monetary support in crowdfunding through the lens of self‐determination theory and cultural background, offering implications for fundraising strategies. Using controlled lab experiments across varied crowdfunding contexts—art, music, small business, and nonprofit campaigns—we explore the overjustification effect and the role of sociocultural factors in shaping donor behavior. Rewards are categorized as extrinsic (gift and recognition) or intrinsic (participation and influence). Findings reveal that removing gifts slightly increases average contributions, whereas eliminating both gifts and recognition reduces support. Donor behavior also varies by country: US‐born participants contribute the most overall, UK‐born donors prefer gift‐free scenarios, and Canadian‐born donors are more generous when both gifts and recognition are absent. These results challenge conventional interpretations of the overjustification effect and highlight the importance of culturally responsive reward structures. We offer practical recommendations for campaign designers and nonprofit organizations to optimize crowdfunding strategies using targeted incentives and social proof. By anchoring donor motivations within a self‐determination framework, this study contributes to the literature on philanthropic marketing and behavioral economics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".