Research Paper
Article citation: Gupta, P., Chauhan, S., & Goyal, S. (2026). The art of persuasion in donation crowdfunding: Exploring the influence of linguistic styles in fundraisers' narratives on multidimensional altruistic motivation. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). DOI: 10.17705/1thci.00246
Abstract
Despite several advantages over traditional donation fundraising models, donation crowdfunding is one of the smallest crowdfunding models by volume worldwide. Two typical challenges that donation crowdfunding faces are attaining legitimacy from potential donors and motivating potential donors to contribute. A fundraiser’s narrative and its linguistic style play an instrumental role in overcoming these challenges. However, academic research on the link between linguistic styles in fundraisers' narratives and potential donors' altruistic motivation remains in its infancy and is scarce in the donation crowdfunding literature. To bridge this gap, we use the multidimensional view of altruism to understand how fundraisers' narrative affects potential donors' intention to donate by provoking altruistic motivation in general and its seven dimensions in particular. Our findings from our experiment provide insights for fundraisers, crowdfunding platform designers, and scholars. In the donation crowdfunding context, our findings explain how linguistic narrative styles (social, emotional, and religious) may bring a change in potential donors' mixed altruistic motives (pure and pseudo-altruistic motives), which influence potential donors’ intention to donate.