Behind the scenes: The role of writing guideline design in online charitable crowdfunding market

The online charitable crowdfunding platform has emerged as a powerful tool for raising funds from large crowds to support non-profit activities. Following a patronage model, fundraisers on the platform are forced to use compelling stories to capture the attention of individual donors. As such, conceptualizing a persuasive request narrative for projects posted on the platform becomes one of the most pressing issues. Project writing guidelines, as an important platform design, are widely adopted to help fundraisers. Unfortunately, their role in the market has not been well examined. To fill this research gap, we leverage a unique dataset from a leading donation-based crowdfunding platform in the United States and make full use of its policy change opportunity on writing guidelines to thoroughly investigate its impacts and the underlying mechanism on donors’ contributions. Our empirical results show that the more constraints the guidelines impose on writing, the more likely they are to weaken the persuasiveness of narratives. We specifically focus on three aspects of narrative complexity and find that writing guidelines have a negative impact on linguistic complexity, which in turn diminishes donors’ contribution behavior. Nevertheless, they have positive impacts on both content and structural complexity, with the difference being that increased content complexity weakens donors’ contributions, while higher structural complexity is more likely to attract donations. Moreover, we examine the heterogeneous effects of writing guidelines on fundraisers with varied involvements. These findings deepen our understanding of writing guidance design in online platforms and have implications for charitable crowdfunding platforms and fundraisers.