Many charitable projects have started using online crowdfunding platforms to raise donations. The rise of these platforms as fundraising vehicles has been partially driven by easy access to a large pool of potential donors without the significant marketing costs that commonly accompany traditional fundraising. However, such a low cost of entry also results in a significant "crowding" of projects, making it difficult for donors to decide which projects to donate to. Thus, a charitable project encounters a fundamental marketing challenge of standing out from other projects when conventional techniques like advertising and promotion are limited. In this paper, we posit that a project can credibly signal its quality via a strategy of "self-donation," whereby the project steward donates to her own project.Our empirical setting is an online education crowdfunding platform. By examining millions of donations, we find that self-donations improve the donation pace, contributed amount, and funding success. We show that the self-donation strategy works only when a self-donation is visible to potential donors and is especially effective at the early stage of the funding cycle or when project stewards are inexperienced, where the projects face significant uncertainty. We find evidence for self-donation as a quality signal through various observable proxies like impact letters to donors and corporate matching. Overall, our findings are consistent with a signaling mechanism that allows the separation of high-quality projects from lower-quality ones.

中文翻译：

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EXPRESS：在线众筹中的自我捐赠和慈善捐款：实证分析


许多慈善项目已开始利用在线众筹平台筹集捐款。这些平台作为筹款工具的兴起，部分原因是可以轻松接触到大量潜在捐助者，而无需支付传统筹款通常伴随的巨额营销成本。然而，如此低的进入成本也导致了项目的严重“拥挤”，使得捐助者很难决定向哪些项目捐款。因此，当广告和促销等传统技术受到限制时，慈善项目面临着从其他项目中脱颖而出的基本营销挑战。在本文中，我们假设一个项目可以通过“自我捐赠”策略来可靠地表明其质量，即项目管理员向自己的项目捐赠。我们的实证背景是一个在线教育众筹平台。通过检查数百万笔捐款，我们发现自我捐款提高了捐款速度、捐款金额和资助成功率。我们表明，只有当潜在捐助者可以看到自我捐赠时，自我捐赠策略才有效，并且在资助周期的早期阶段或项目管理者缺乏经验（项目面临重大不确定性）时尤其有效。我们通过各种可观察的代理（例如给捐赠者的影响信和企业匹配）找到了自我捐赠作为质量信号的证据。总体而言，我们的研究结果与将高质量项目与低质量项目分开的信号机制是一致的。