Visual narrative plays a significant role in engaging people to donate to online crowdfunding campaigns. This article investigates visual illness narrative patterns (VINPs) and evaluates their impact on medical crowdfunding. In Study 1, 11,445 images featured in 824 medical crowdfunding campaigns were analysed and yielded four major VINPs: normality pattern, debility pattern, health-to-illness transition pattern and embedded-transition pattern. Studies 2 and 3 present two experiments exploring potential donors’ responses to medical crowdfunding campaigns featuring different VINPs. The findings reveal variations in donation amounts across the four VINPs when the patient is an adult. The dynamic and connected embedded-transition patterns demonstrate significantly better fundraising effects than static normality patterns – a trend that holds across gender and disease type but does not hold when the patient is a child.
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