The power of collective endorsements: Promoting credibility, belonging, and participation in medical support communities

Medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Recently, crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe have helped reduce medical bankruptcies across the United States by allowing people to easily create a personal campaign webpage and raise funds from a large number of people on the Internet. One notable GoFundMe campaign, created by a family with a son who needs stem cell treatment, raised over $250,000 in a week and has been shared over 4,000 times. How can an individuals medical story shared on the Internet attract such a large number of people – including strangers – to support the patient? My thesis addresses this issue through several different angles: credibility, social translucency, and community participation. Tying these three themes together is the concept of collective endorsements. I introduced the concept of collective endorsements while investigating the factors that influence the perceived credibility of medical crowdfunding campaigns. Establishing the credibility of medical crowdfunding campaigns is very important because many potential supporters often worry about participating in fraudulent campaigns. In particular, strangers who do not have any personal relationship with the patient often have difficulty evaluating the campaign’s credibility due to their limited ability to verify the patient’s medical situation. Collective endorsements offer an alternative way to assess the patient's medical situation through a collection of evidence: what many people say and do around the patient. In medical crowdfunding campaigns, however, most collective endorsements, such as campaign shares and offline support, are not visible to many other current and potential supporters because they occur outside of crowdfunding sites. Therefore, drawing from social translucence theory and impression management theory, I examine various ways to design interfaces that can make these invisible collective endorsements visible on medical crowdfunding campaigns. Finally, I design and build the Community Journey crowdfunding interface that highlights all of a patient’s collective endorsements. With Community Journey, I show that strangers feel a significantly greater sense of community and are more willing to contribute on Community Journey than on a traditional medical crowdfunding interface