When a Crisis Has a Silver Lining: Social Media P2P Fundraising at the Start of COVID-19

Abstract

Research suggests that global crises generally have a negative impact on donations to nonprofit organizations. In this research note, we challenge whether this wisdom applies to all channels by examining a growing digital fundraising channel, social media peer-to-peer (p2p) fundraising, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. Through both United States and German samples, we study which nonprofit organizations over- and underperformed compared to the market average to glean the potential drivers of success. We demonstrate that not all crises lower generosity, provide managerial insights into this new digital fundraising channel, and discuss how our results are generalizable to other channels and crises.

Keywords

social media Facebook fundraisers global crisis COVID-19

Introduction

Because many nonprofit organizations rely on private donations, they often suffer when economic crises reduce people’s income and prosocial inclination. The 2008 financial crisis, for example, led to a drop in donations of over 11% in the United Kingdom, 6% in the United States (National Council for Voluntary Organisations and Charities Aid Foundation, 2009), and 20% in Australia (Godfrey & Williamson, 2020). Examining more than 40 years of longitudinal data, Habibpour et al. (2017) demonstrate that a 1% decrease in GDP relates to a 51% decrease in donations over the studied period.

Thus, one might expect the recent economic crisis caused by COVID-19 to inflict similar pain. Certainly, nonprofit organizations expressed concerns about the impact of the pandemic on donation behavior and volunteering (e.g., Dederichs, 2023; Whitehead, 2020). At the same time, COVID-19 was a once-in-a-century event: Governments responded to the virus’ rapid spread by implementing unusually dramatic measures, such as locking down their populations and creating massive stimulus packages; companies put workers on temporary leave and quickly transitioned to digital communication (e.g., Palmer, 2020).

With this research note, we challenge the common wisdom around economic crises and their effect on philanthropy by studying a relatively new digital fundraising channel: social media p2p fundraising. This type of fundraising is an evolution of crowdfunding. It refers to any effort from social media users (organizers) on a social media platform (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) to organize campaigns for a social cause. Social media users fundraise in the name of their preferred nonprofit organization by asking friends, family, and acquaintances to donate. Thus, social media p2p fundraising can extend a nonprofit organization’s reach in ways that traditional methods cannot. Most of these campaigns have occurred via Facebook, which has collected more than $US7 billion in donations as of November 2021 (Meta, 2022).

Thus, we examine the performance of social media p2p fundraising on Facebook at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. Did the start impact this fundraising, and if yes, in which direction? Which nonprofit organizations performed above and below the market average, and what factors facilitated better performance?

Our work delivers managerial and theoretical contributions. We show that the COVID-19 crisis positively affected social media p2p fundraising. This result contrasts past crisis research and cannot be explained by the channel’s growth but rather by the crisis itself. Second, we relate the success of social media p2p fundraising to the characteristics of nonprofit organizations and their social media activity. We also examine how these characteristics changed before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Thus, we provide insights for managing this new fundraising channel. We conclude by discussing the paper’s limitations and the avenues for future research.

Research Background

Social Media P2p Fundraising

Social media platforms have become an integral way for nonprofit organizations to connect with donors, but understanding of how to best use social media to fundraise is still limited (Xiao et al., 2021). Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have implemented tools that empower users to launch campaigns via the “raise money” button on a nonprofit organization’s profile page. The platforms transfer the full amount of donations to the organization. These donations typically come from the campaign organizer’s close circle, which includes family, friends, and business associates, that is, other social media users with a tie strength to the organizer (Stolz & Schlereth, 2021). Since donor recruitment happens inside the platform, social media p2p fundraising represents an extension of the crowdfunding model (e.g., JustGiving or BetterPlace). Birthday events are a common basis for campaigns, although some users also issue challenges such as “I will perform ten push-ups daily for every donation.”

Donors seem to respond well to social media as a fundraising platform. This type of fundraising leverages the organizer’s ties to a community and enables donors to receive recognition or prestige from the organizer through an altruistic act. Their ties to the organizer may play a vital role together with conformity with peers (Chapman et al., 2019). On top of that, donors want to gain something in return: a wish for recognition or prestige from the organizer. However, because this type of fundraising is so new, there are few academic insights into the channel’s behavior when faced with external shocks. We contribute by determining the impact of a nonprofit organization’s social media presence on its social media p2p fundraising success, both during and outside of a crisis.

Donations During Global Crises and Why There Might Be Differences Between Channels

Global crises have a documented negative impact on charitable giving. When faced with adverse circumstances, individuals may shift from prosocial to selfish behaviors for self-preservation reasons (Fridman et al., 2022). Some nonprofit organizations may suffer more than others. During the 2008–2009 recession, for instance, nonprofit organizations related to “arts and culture” experienced the most significant drop, while the incomes for “health” and “social services” fell the least (Dietz et al., 2014). No cause recorded a rise in donations.

Notably, the Great Recession had a negative impact on crowdfunding, but the drop was smaller compared to traditional sources of start-up capital (Nespoli et al., 2022). Relationships with donors may be key here: Lin and Wang (2016) found that fundraising becomes difficult in times of crisis unless there is a solid preexisting relationship with the donor—something that campaign organizers for social media p2p fundraising generally have due to being seen as opinion leaders. Thus, social media p2p fundraising might not react to exogenous shocks like classical fundraising and may be more resistant to crises.

Another potential factor derives from what Zaki (2020) labeled catastrophe compassion theory: As Fridman et al. (2022) explained, groups often demonstrate strong cohesion and prosocial behavior when faced with a common threat, which may mitigate the decline in donations. While Kim and Mason (2020) recorded a drop in donations at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, some research suggests that the uncertainty stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic may have promoted such generosity (Fridman et al., 2022). However, Paarlberg et al. (2020) argue that donation resilience during a crisis depends on cultural and political ideology.

Given this ambiguity, there is value in investigating the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on individual fundraising channels instead of the entire donation mix. Beyond adding to the literature on donation mechanisms, we support nonprofit organizations in the expectation management of a new crisis impact on their business.

Data and Method Description

We concentrate on the United States because it is the largest and arguably most mature social media p2p fundraising market, with the respective tools first rolled out there in 2015. We also examine data from Germany, a less mature market that did not receive these tools until two years later, in 2017. By comparing the two countries, we can add (to some degree) generalizability to our results and undercut maturity level as a confound.

Data Collection

For the United States, we utilized Forbes’ list of 100 largest nonprofit organizations; for Germany, we considered a similar list from the Deutsches Institute für Soziale Fragen (DZI). For each organization, we tested whether they enabled fundraising on Facebook, and if so, we manually extracted all publicly displayed campaigns. We browsed the nonprofit organizations’ Facebook profile page and saved the page source code into a JSON file.

Next, we extracted essential campaign information using self-developed algorithms on the locally stored data. Following the suggestions in Boegershausen et al. (2022) for the use of web-site extracted data in scientific research, we reflected on the validity, legal, ethical, and technical challenges and documented how we coped with them. For example, one validity challenge was the fact that Facebook changed which campaigns were publicly visible. Before January 2020 only campaigns that collected $50 or more were visible; subsequently, all campaigns were visible. To tackle this challenge, we limited the complete dataset to campaigns that collected over $50. Further, on the legal side, we follow the scraping guidelines published by Facebook. We extract the webpages we need manually (using the JSON format) and then automate the data gathering out of the JSON files. Furthermore, complemented the data with public information on the nonprofit organizations’ size (yearly donations in 2019) and activity level on Facebook.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 1 summarizes the data as of May 31, 2020. Of the 200 nonprofit organizations, 193 had a profile page on Facebook, of which 130 had social media p2p fundraising activated. The donations collected and the mean amounts donated per campaign in the United States exceeded those collected in Germany by the factors of 7.84 and 5.65.

Table 1.

Key Information as of May 31, 2020.

Key information	United States	Germany	Multiplicator United States vs. Germany
Nonprofit organizations with a Facebook profile page	97	96	1.01
Nonprofit organizations with activated social media p2p fundraising	70	50	1.40
Number of campaigns	43,568	31,419	1.39
Number of donors (mean number per campaign)	266,394 (6.11)	75,975 (2.42)	3.51 (2.52)
Amount donated (mean amount per campaign)	€14,277,124 (€327.70)	€1,821,768 (€57.98)	7.84 (5.65)

At the time of data collection, Facebook only publicly displayed campaigns with at least $50 in donations. To give the data more context, we partnered with two German nonprofit organizations that kindly provided their internal fundraising data. For these nonprofit organizations, our data capture, on average, 87.45% of all donations (82.17% and 92.73%) and 46.57% (39.65% and 53.49%) of the number of campaigns. While we acknowledge this difference, we did not factor it into the subsequent analysis for simplicity’s sake.

In light of Godfrey and Williamson (2020) finding that fundraising success depends on the nonprofit organization’s cause, we controlled for this factor in our analysis. Two independent coders judged the most likely cause based on the nonprofit organization’s mission statement. The largest group was “international development aid” (32.29% of all campaigns), followed by “social services” (15.96%), “environmental and animal protection” (13.77%), and “health” (12.52%). The remaining campaigns belonged to “culture,” “education,” “development support,” “human rights,” “religious groups,” and “other.”

Analytical Approach

Our analytical approach is twofold: For a first overview of the trends and to examine how the COVID-19 crisis affected social media p2p fundraising on average, we used visual inspections and ARMAX models (e.g., Dekimpe & Hanssens, 2000). These models are very useful in helping us visualize trends and in detecting changes in a time series. For a more detailed understanding of how the onset of the COVID-19 crisis impacted social media p2p fundraising, we adapted the event study methodology—as described in, for example, Sorescu et al. (2017). Event studies are a well-accepted method to study how a sudden event can lead a time series to deviate from its current trend. Further, we separately applied the event study method to each nonprofit organization to identify which ones fared better than others. Finally, we ran cross-sectional tests to examine the drivers of successful responses to the COVID-19 crisis and whether said drivers were the same as before the pandemic.

Following the guidelines described by Sorescu et al. (2017), the event study method requires three premises: (1) the event must be sudden, (2) unanticipated, and (3) the dependent variable must rapidly absorb new information and be forward-looking. Because the pandemic was not a sudden event, we reviewed the literature to identify how researchers mitigate if not all critical premises are fulfilled. To that end, we chose the event date by using the public perception of the crisis as measured through Google Trends for the term “Corona.” We observe a rise in search volume from 0% to 100% in a few days, but with a difference of 6 days in both countries: March 1, 2020, for the United States and March 7, 2020, for Germany. To examine the sensitivity of the chosen event dates, we varied them in a 6-day window (3 days before and after) and found the substantive results to be stable. We used an analysis window of 6 months before the event dates, such that nearly 90% of nonprofit organizations attracted at least one campaign in the training period.

We adopted the ARMAX model from Horvath et al. (2002) to predict the number of campaigns created per day at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. This time-series model uses pre-COVID-19 data for its forecast, such that quantifying the deviations between the predictions against the observed number of campaigns (calculated as cumulated abnormal returns) provides us with inferences on the direction and extent of COVID-19’s impact on social media p2p fundraising. One requirement for unbiased predictions is data stationarity, which is fulfilled here according to visual and statistical stationarity tests.

To control for seasonal effects, we extended the model through an exogenous variable that contains the number of campaigns 1 year before the predicted day. We determined the optimal lag/moving average by minimizing the Akaike Information Criterion, which suggests a lag of 5 days and a moving-average window of 16 days. We also found support for these lengths through visual analysis of the ACF (autocorrelation function, i.e., moving-average component) and PACF (partial autocorrelation function, i.e., lag component).

We separately repeated the event study method on each nonprofit organization. Using cross-sectional tests on the cumulated abnormal returns of each firm, we investigated which ones fared better than the market average. We also employed cross-sectional tests on the number of campaigns started in March 2020 to examine the drivers of success. Both analyses used nonprofit organizations’ characteristics (cause, size by yearly donation volume, and age) and engagement on Facebook (number of page likes, photos posted, visits, reviews by users, and the resulting rating) as independent variables.

Results

Crisis Impact on Number of Campaigns: Model-Free Evidence and ARMAX

We plot the daily number of campaigns from January to the end of May 2020 in Figure 1. To visualize the impact, we normalized the daily number of campaigns by the mean until the end of February 2020. We observe a considerable rise in the United States from March 3, which peaked on March 18 and returned to its previous levels. The climb was more gradual in Germany, with a steady rise in numbers until April 3 followed by a subsequent drop that remained above pre-COVID-19 levels.

Figure 1.

Campaigns Created Per Day Normalized by Pre-COVID-19 Average.

The ARMAX model predicts 534.21% fewer campaigns than observed in the United States and 424.07% fewer in Germany (i.e., 51 organizations in the United States and 29 in Germany had more campaigns than expected). The root mean square error (RMSE) is 74.87. The seasonal control variable is insignificant (p>.1). One year before the crisis, the prediction powers of the ARMAX models were substantially better by factor ten, which suggests that COVID-19 changed fundraising behavior in this channel: We only predicted 27.47% more campaigns in the United States than observed and 35.40% in Germany.

In short, there were significantly more social media p2p campaigns than expected at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. We find support that COVID-19 (the first wave) positively related to a rise in social media p2p fundraising campaigns. Subsequently, we want to understand how and why the crisis affected some nonprofit organizations more than others.

Performance Comparison of Nonprofit Organizations During the Crisis: Event Study

Overall, 25.71% of the United States nonprofit organizations exhibited significant (t>1.64) cumulated abnormal returns in the event period, compared to 16.00% of German firms. In the United States, only two nonprofit organizations had significantly (t > 1.64) positive cumulated abnormal returns (Wounded Warrior Project (WWP), American Heart), with a high mean of 12.06. Another 16 nonprofit organizations had significantly (t > 1.64) negative cumulated abnormal returns, with a mean of -1.51 (e.g., the United Service Organizations (USO), Feeding America, the Houston Foodbank, and Special Olympics). This result indicates that two nonprofit organizations benefited in particular from the crisis.

In Germany, the impact was more balanced. Five nonprofit organizations had significantly (t > 1.64) positive cumulated abnormal returns (e.g., Welthungerhilfe, Kinder und Jugend Hospiz Balthasar, UNICEF Deutschland), with a mean of 1.09. Three had significantly (t > 1.64) negative cumulated abnormal returns, with a mean of −1.70 (NPH Kinderhilfe, Rotes Kreuz, Save the Children). In other words, the majority of organizations performed along average market lines. We conclude that while social media p2p campaigns may have seen a slight rise in donations without the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic seems to have bolstered them.

Drivers Related to an Above Market Average Performance: Cross-Sectional Tests

Knowing what drives success during a crisis can help nonprofit organizations better design their fundraising strategies. Thus, we focused on the cumulated abnormal returns to understand why specific nonprofit organizations fared better than the market average during the COVID-19 crisis. We used an ordinary least square regression, as cross-sectional tests can help explain why an event may affect a dependent variable and allow us to link the dependent variable with potential moderators. Table 2 presents the results of our analysis.

Table 2.

Cross-Sectional Analysis Results.

	Regression against cumulated abnormal returns CAR_i		Regression against number of created campaigns per organization over 30 days (March 2020)
Variable	United States	German	United States, during COVID-19	United States, one year before	Germany, during COVID-19	Germany, one year before
Constant	–11.13 (5.41)**	4.97 (8.08)	–3.65 (0.45)***	0.19 (0.11)*	1.035 (0.29)***	1.15 (0.15)
Nonprofit organization’s characteristics
Donation amount in 2019 (per 1,000,000)	–0.01 (0.04)	–0.10 (0.07)	0.00 (0.00)	–0.00 (0.01)	–0.01 (0.00)***	0.00 (0.00)
Nonprofit organization age	–0.10 (0.43)	0.09 (0.05)	0.01 (0.00)**	0.00 (0.00)	0.02 (0.00)***	0.00 (0.00)
Cause: Culture	–4.46 (10.73)	Not in sample	–0.56 (0.87)	2.78 (0.20)***	Not in sample
Cause: Education and Research	5.16 (6.03)	–4.01 (9.21)	2.53 (0.50)***	–0.19 (0.12)	–0.38 (0.33)	–0.48 (0.13)***
Cause: Health	1.93 (6.03)	–4.87 (7.44)	2.05 (0.49)***	0.10 (0.11)	–0.91 (0.27)***	–0.39 (0.11)***
Cause: Social Services	1.56 (5.52)***	–8.38 (6.71)	2.43 (0.45)***	–0.19 (0.10)*	–2.20 (0.27)***	–0.32 (0.11)***
Cause : Environmental and animal protection	–9.11 (7.67)	–1.48 (1.23)	1.55 (0.65)***	0.42 (0.15)***	–2.24 (0.27)***	–0.56 (0.18)***
Cause : Development support	9.00 (5.95)	–8.74 (12.22)	2.56 (0.49)***	–0.06 (0.11)	–2.03 (0.44)***	–0.73 (0.18)***
Cause: Human rights, law, and politics	–4.52 (1.09)	–11.29 (16.63)	–0.76 (0.88)	–0.21 (0.20)	–3.83 (0.60)***	–.80 (0.24)***
Cause: International development aid	Reference
Cause: Others	Not in sample	–6.99 (12.23)	Not in sample		–3.9 (0.45)***	–0.43 (0.18)
Nonprofit organization’s Facebook presence
Facebook: Likes in 1,000,000	55.98 (27.10)**	35.26 (50.82)	1.88 (0.24)***	–0.22 (0.05)***	3.16 (1.85)*	0.77 (0.73)
Facebook: Photos posted in 1,000	27.00 (9.44)***	–1.16 (3.14)	0.87 (0.08)***	–0.01 (0.02)***	2.06 (0.66)***	0.60 (0.26)**
Facebook: Logged visits to nonprofit in 1,000	–0.27 (0.37)	1.19 (5.79)	–0.01 (0.00)***	0.01 (0.00)***	0.34 (0.21)	0.16 (0.08)*
Facebook: Review count in 1,000	9.26 (6.09)	–4.52 (3.35)	0.33 (0.05)***	–0.01 (0.01)	7.02 (0.49)***	0.47 (0.20)***
Facebook: Rating	3.18 (8.57)	0.17 (1.20)	0.08 (0.07)	0.04 (0.02)***	–0.20 (0.05)***	–0.19 (0.02)***
R ²	.21	.14	.20	.13	.38	.13
Observations	70	50	2100 (70 × 30)		1500 (50 × 30)
Correlation between donation amount in 2019 and number of campaigns (p-value)	–	–	0.04 (0.77)	0.03 (0.83)	0.30 (0.04)	0.03 (0.84)

Note. When testing for multicollinearity concerns, all variance inflation factors (VIF) are below the critical threshold of 3 for the United States. For Germany, there are only few increased VIF-values (up to 5.5), particularly between the number of Facebook likes and photos.

Significance level α = .01→***p < .01. α = .05→**p < .05. α = .1→*p<.1.

For the US sample, there were only a few drivers behind why specific nonprofit organizations outperformed the market at the start of COVID-19. “Social services” was the only cause that showed a positive, (weakly) significant relationship with the cumulated abnormal returns (p < .1). The other significant drivers related to the nonprofit organization’s Facebook presence: the number of likes (positive, p<.05), the number of reviews (positive, p < .01), and Facebook’s rating of a nonprofit organization (positive, p < .1).

For the German sample, none of the independent variables significantly related to the cumulated abnormal returns, that is, they cannot explain why the German nonprofit organizations over- or underperformed. Consequently, the R-squared of the model in Germany was half that of the US model.

Drivers Related to Attracting Many Campaigns: Cross-Sectional Tests

To help professionals learn how to optimize their fundraising, we also examined which drivers enabled nonprofit organizations to attract many campaigns. As seen in Table 2, we used the same independent variables on the number of campaigns in March 2020 as the dependent variable and contrasted the results during COVID with those one year prior to the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 crisis, managing the Facebook presence was key to the firm’s social media p2p fundraising success. In both countries, the number of photos, likes, and reviews all exerted positive and significant effects (all p < .01). Likewise, the impact of these drivers was weaker before the COVID-19 crisis in both countries, as indicated by the smaller parameter values alongside the mostly consistent parameter signs and statistical significance.

Regarding characteristics, the age of a nonprofit organization was significant (p < .05) during the COVID-19 crisis but insignificant before. That is, older organizations held an advantage. Meanwhile, large nonprofit organizations (as expressed in 2019 donation amounts) did not automatically attract more campaigns on social media. The correlation coefficient between the total donation amount in 2019 and the number of attracted campaigns on social media reached a maximum value of 0.30 (p < .05) but was substantially lower before the COVID-19 crisis. This result mirrors Saxton and Wang (2013), who found that nonprofit organizations’ campaign success relates to neither financial capacity nor size. Thus, nonprofit organization managers cannot rely on the absolute size of their firms for a strong performance in social media p2p fundraising.

There are notable differences between the United States and German samples. The first concerns cause: in the United States, nonprofit organizations supporting “education and research,” “health,” “social services,” “environmental and animal protection,” and “development support” all gained an advantage at the start of COVID-19 compared to the reference cause “international development aid.” Meanwhile, “international development aid” outperformed every other cause in Germany. Second, between the two time periods, the direction of the effects changed for certain variables among US firms but not their German peers. Third, the Facebook rating of a nonprofit organization is negatively related to the number of campaigns in Germany but not in the United States. Relatedly, the correlation between a nonprofit organization’s total donations and the number of campaigns created for it was much lower in the United States than in Germany. In Germany, this correlation increased during the COVID-19 crisis but decreased minimally in the United States.

Discussion

Crisis Literature

By analyzing social media p2p fundraising at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, we deliver insights for both scholars and professional fundraisers. In contrast to past research, which has concluded that crises negatively impact prosocial behavior (Kim & Mason, 2020; Lin & Wang, 2016), we demonstrate that this finding does not apply to all crises and fundraising channels. Relying on the event study method, we illustrate that the onset of COVID-19 had a considerable positive impact on the social media p2p fundraising market.

Granted, these differences may stem from the specific nature of the COVID-19 pandemic relative to other crises. For instance, the 2008 financial crisis negatively impacted all industries, whereas the COVID-19 crisis harmed certain industries (e.g., hospitality) and boosted others (e.g., digital technologies). In addition, the aid programs initiated by some governments may have mitigated the crisis’ financial impact and affected charitability. For example, people working in more resilient companies and industries may have considered themselves “luckier” and donated more. In other words, the pandemic—with its emphasis on social distancing—may have led people to see campaigns as a way to stay active with others and be helpful amid the restrictions. Professional fundraisers that we interviewed supported this thesis, although the scholarly evidence is more nuanced. Grimalda et al. (2021) found that personal exposure to COVID-19 increased donations relative to the unexposed, even as levels of environmental exposure (number of local cases) had no effect. Fridman et al. (2022) similarly observed that COVID-19 increased financial generosity, but this increase was unrelated to the threat level (as expressed through the number of daily deaths).

Alternatively, the nature of social media p2p fundraising itself may explain its resistance to external shocks. In this format, donors participate due to their relationship with the campaign organizer rather than the nonprofit organization (Chapman et al., 2019). It may be that donations flowing from that specific relationship are less susceptible to external shocks than those based on altruism.

Scholars could test this supposition by examining how the start of the Ukraine war impacted the related social media fundraising campaigns. In addition, the volume of social media activity surrounding the Ukraine war may have pushed donors to donate to gain social prestige. The immediacy of the need created by the war may have further motivated donors. Confirming these ideas could be an avenue for further research.

Insights on Social Media P2p Fundraising

This research note fills a knowledge gap about social media p2p fundraising. Specifically, we explored the drivers of higher donations during COVID-19 to uncover insights that might help fundraising professionals optimize their social media p2p fundraising. We found that a nonprofit organization’s social media presence is crucial to its success in this domain—more so now than before the pandemic. Being active on social media (i.e., staying fresh in people’s minds) seems to be more important than having a large fan base (measured by the number of likes). This means that smaller organizations can successfully leverage social media to fundraise.

We uncovered additional nuances when comparing the data for the United States and Germany. Even though we observed more donations at the beginning of COVID-19 for both countries, overall, the US was the more profitable market: The crisis led to a sharp rise in fundraising, creating an effect that was well suited for the event study method. In Germany, the development was much more gradual and spread over an extended period. Thus, in that country, the results of the event study and the cross-sectional analysis of the cumulated abnormal returns were less clear and meaningful. Consequently, we could not determine which drivers were responsible for how Germany’s social media p2p fundraising scene changed. Nonetheless, when coupling our findings with the relatively low cost of fundraising via social media, organizations should be encouraged to explore this promising new channel.

Conclusion

For managers of nonprofit organizations, we draw the following conclusions. First, our results suggest that social media p2p fundraising is a very promising fundraising channel that seems resistant to external crises. Social media p2p fundraising may be particularly interesting for small nonprofit organizations as it is not the size of a fan base that drives the success of campaigns but the level of activity within a social media community. Time and effort should be invested in creating a lively community on social media. To track their progress in reaching this goal, nonprofit managers should focus on the number of comments and likes they receive on their posts and not on the absolute number of likes or visits their main social media page has. Furthermore, they can attempt to increase the number of campaigns started for them by actively asking the community to create campaigns.

While our research provides first insights into the growing domain of social media p2p fundraisers, it also contains several limitations. First, we restricted our analysis to the United States and Germany. While this helped to ameliorate the maturity stage as a confound, the results cannot provide global generalizability. Thus, scholars should attempt to apply our methods to other countries and cultures. Second, future studies might examine the specific characteristics of organizers and donors, such as their unique motivations or their relational dynamics. Third, we recommend that researchers study whether an NPO's ability to motivate social media p2p fundraising campaigns is a useful indicator of success. Finally, scholars could closely analyze how different governmental measures to fight COVID-19 may have impacted people’s generosity. In short, we see several avenues for future research.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Bernd Skiera and participants of his doctoral colloquium as well as Peter Kreutter and the Center of Nonprofit Management and Social Impact for their critical review of this research.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Beatrice Martin

Author Biographies

Beatrice Martin is a Doctoral student at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management at the chair of Professor Christian Schlereth. Her research explores how to best manage social media p2p fundraising activities and the moderators of donation behavior.

Christian Schlereth is a professor of digital marketing at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and a member of the ambassador council of Welthungerhilfe (German nonprofit organization). His research primarily addresses questions about the use of digitization, whether its benefits can be quantitatively determined, and what implications can be derived for practice.

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