2 research outputs found
How Medical Crowdfunding Helps People? A Large-scale Case Study on Waterdrop Fundraising
While online medical crowdfunding achieved tremendous success, quantitative
study about whether and how medical crowdfunding helps people remains little
explored. In this paper, we empirically study how online medical crowdfunding
helps people using more than 27, 000 fundraising cases in Waterdrop
Fundraising, one of the most popular online medical crowdfunding platforms in
China. We find that the amount of money obtained by fundraisers is broadly
distributed, i.e., a majority of lowly donated cases coexist with a handful of
very successful cases. We further investigate the factors that potentially
correlate with the success of medical fundraising cases. Profile information of
fundraising cases, e.g., geographic information of fundraisers, affects the
donated amounts, since detailed description may increase the credibility of a
fundraising case. One prominent finding lies in the effect of social network on
the success of fundraising cases: the spread of fundraising information along
social network is a key factor of fundraising success, and the social capital
of fundraisers play an important role in fundraising. Finally, we conduct
prediction of donations using machine learning models, verifying the effect of
potential factors to the success of medical crowdfunding. Altogether, this work
presents a data-driven view of medical fundraising on the web and opens a door
to understanding medical crowdfunding.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at ICWSM 202