How backers' behavior affects financing performance in agri-food reward-based crowdfunding: The moderating mechanism of initiator characteristics and project attributes.

Crowdfunding is a new type of financing favored by entrepreneurs in need of capital. Financing performance is a key concern for crowdfunding project initiators. Although a growing number of studies have investigated the factors that affect the financing performance of crowdfunding projects, there are still some issues that need to be further clarified. How does the investment behavior of backers, as the supply side of finance, affect the financing performance of project in reward-based crowdfunding? What are the moderating mechanisms of this influence by initiator characteristics and project attributes? Based on a panel data set from Zhongchou, a famous agri-food crowdfunding platform in China, this paper finds that the investment speed, the investment intensity, the number of early backers, the backers' comments, and the number of selfless backers all have significant effects on financing performance. The core trust factors of initiator characteristics and project attributes play a moderating role in the relationship between backer investment behavior and financing performance, but there are differences in the moderating mechanisms. Based on the research conclusions, practical enlightenment is proposed for initiators, crowdfunding platforms, and regulators.

Unmet financial needs among patients crowdfunding to support gynecologic cancer care.

BACKGROUND: Patients may use crowdfunding to solicit donations, typically from multiple small donors using internet-based means, to offset the financial toxicity of cancer care. OBJECTIVE: To describe crowdfunding campaigns by gynecologic cancer patients and to compare campaign characteristics and needs expressed between patients with cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancer. STUDY DESIGN: We queried the public crowdfunding forum GoFundMe.com for "cervical cancer," "uterine cancer," and "ovarian cancer." The first 200 consecutive posts for each cancer type fundraising within the United States were analyzed. Data on campaign goals and needs expressed were manually extracted. Descriptive statistics and bivariate analyses were performed. RESULTS: Among the 600 fundraising pages, the median campaign goal was $10,000 [IQR $5000-$23,000]. Campaigns raised a median of 28.6% of their goal with only 8.7% of campaigns reaching their goal after a median of 54 days online. On average, ovarian cancer campaigns had higher monetary goals, more donors, and larger donation amounts than cervical cancer campaigns and raised more money than both cervical and uterine cancer campaigns. Campaigns were fundraising to support medical costs (80-85%) followed by lost wages (36-56%) or living expenses (27-41%). Cervical cancer campaigns reported need for non-medical costs more frequently than uterine or ovarian cancer campaigns. States without Medicaid expansions (31% of the national population) were over-represented among cervical cancer and uterine cancer, but not ovarian cancer campaigns. CONCLUSIONS: Crowdfunding pages reveal patients fundraising for out-of-pocket costs in the thousands of dollars and a wide range of unmet financial needs based on cancer type.

[Medical philanthropy in the United States]. / La philanthropie médicale aux États-Unis.

Philanthropic foundations played a crucial role in rationalizating and organizing American society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The promotion of science was applied to medical reform, leading to the advent of genuine medical research within the framework of brand-new university hospital faculties. With the two world wars, the state became heavily involved in the field of healthcare. After 1945, it became the main source of funding for biomedical research. Philanthropy did not disappear from the institutional landscape; it continued to work in tandem with public authorities. Its role in medical research is now minor in terms of funding volume, but a strategic one in the development of projects aimed at advancing basic science and knowledge of various diseases.

Title: La philanthropie médicale aux États-Unis. Abstract: Les fondations philanthropiques ont pris une part décisive dans la rationalisation et l'organisation de la médecine dans la société américaine des débuts du xxe siècle, période pendant laquelle la promotion de la science a donné lieu à l'avènement d'une véritable recherche médicale spécialisée dans le cadre des nouvelles facultés hospitalo-universitaires. Avec les deux guerres mondiales, l'État fédéral s'est fortement engagé dans le champ de la santé. Au point qu'après 1945, il est devenu la principale source de financement de l'innovation biomédicale. La philanthropie ne disparaît pas pour autant du paysage institutionnel. Elle continue de fonctionner en tandem avec les pouvoirs publics. Son rôle est aujourd'hui minoritaire en termes de volume de financement, mais stratégique dans l'avènement de projets visant à faire avancer les connaissances sur des processus fondamentaux ainsi que sur de nombreuses maladies.

Charitable crowdfunding donation-intention estimation depending on emotional project images using fNIRS-based functional connectivity.

Charitable fundraising increasingly relies on online crowdfunding platforms. Project images of charitable crowdfunding use emotional appeals to promote helping behavior. Negative emotions are commonly used to motivate helping behavior because the image of a happy child may not motivate donors to donate as willingly. However, some research has found that happy images can be more beneficial. These contradictory results suggest that the emotional valence of project imagery and how fundraisers frame project images effectively remain debatable. Thus, we compared and analyzed brain activation differences in the prefrontal cortex governing human emotions depending on donation decisions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a neuroimaging device. We advance existing theory on charitable behavior by demonstrating that little correlation exists in donation intentions and brain activity between negative and positive project images, which is consistent with survey results on donation intentions by victim image. We also discovered quantitative brain hemodynamic signal variations between donors and nondonors, which can predict and detect donor mental brain functioning using functional connectivity, that is, the statistical dependence between the time series of electrophysiological activity and oxygenated hemodynamic levels in the prefrontal cortex. These findings are critical in developing future marketing strategies for online charitable crowdfunding platforms, especially project images.

Raising Money to Support School Nurses and School Nursing Research: NASN's Endowment Fund.

Have you ever wondered how the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) supports school nursing research and clinical practice degree advancement or how they provide opportunities to strengthen advocacy skills? NASN does this work through an endowment fund which provides annual scholarships and grants to members to support their various professional endeavors.

The Importance of Philanthropy Foundation for the Future Sustainability of Agriculture and Nutrition: An Opinion Study on Practical Applications, Policies, and Strategies.

Food security, food sustainability, and malnutrition represent critical global challenges. Th urgency of comprehensive action is evident in the need for research collaboration between the food industry, agriculture, public health, and nutrition. This article highlights the role of philanthropy, of a non-profit organization, in supporting research and development and filling financial gaps. The article also explores the interplay of nutrition, agriculture, and government and policy, positioning philanthropy as a catalyst for transformative change and advocating for collaborative efforts to comprehensively address global food challenges. In addition, the discussion also underscores the ethical complexities surrounding charitable food aid, especially in terms of the dignity and autonomy of its recipients. The paper concludes by proposing future directions and implications, advocating for diversified intervention portfolios and collaborative efforts involving governments, businesses, and local communities. Apart from that, the importance of answering and alleviating ethical dilemmas related to food charity assistance needs to be a concern for future studies related to philanthropy because of the significant challenges faced by the contemporary food system, which include food security, health, and nutritional sustainability.

Mapping philanthropic support of science.

While philanthropic support for science has increased in the past decade, there is limited quantitative knowledge about the patterns that characterize it and the mechanisms that drive its distribution. Here, we map philanthropic funding to universities and research institutions based on IRS tax forms from 685,397 non-profit organizations. We identify nearly one million grants supporting institutions involved in science and higher education, finding that in volume and scope, philanthropy is a significant source of funds, reaching an amount that rivals some of the key federal agencies like the NSF and NIH. Our analysis also reveals that philanthropic funders tend to focus locally, indicating that criteria beyond research excellence play an important role in funding decisions, and that funding relationships are stable, i.e. once a grant-giving relationship begins, it tends to continue in time. Finally, we show that the bipartite funder-recipient network displays a highly overrepresented motif indicating that funders who share one recipient also share other recipients and we show that this motif contains predictive power for future funding relationships. We discuss the policy implications of our findings on inequality in science, scientific progress, and the role of quantitative approaches to philanthropy.

The Wallet Biopsy: Medical Crowdfunding for Heart Transplantation.

Financial considerations continue to impact access to heart transplantation. Transplant recipients face various costs, including, but not limited to, the index hospitalization, immunosuppressive medications, and lodging and travel to appointments. In this study, we sought to describe the state of crowdfunding for individuals being evaluated for heart transplantation. Using the search term heart transplant, 1000 GoFundMe campaigns were reviewed. After exclusions, 634 (63.4%) campaigns were included. Most campaigns were in support of white individuals (57.8%), males (63.1%) and adults (76.7%). Approximately 15% of campaigns had not raised any funds. The remaining campaigns fundraised a median of $53.24 dollars per day. Of the patients, 44% were admitted at the time of the fundraising. Within the campaigns in the United States, the greatest proportions were in the Southeast United States in non-Medicaid expansion states. These findings highlight the significant financial toxicities associated with heart transplantation and the need for advocacy at the governmental and payer levels to improve equitable access and coverage for all.

The WHO Foundation in global health governance: Depoliticizing corporate philanthropy.

The creation of the WHO Foundation during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a significant institutional development in the politics of financing the World Health Organization (WHO). In the context of longstanding acute financial pressures, the objective of the WHO Foundation is to widen WHO's resource base by attracting philanthropic donations from the commercial sector. In placing funding decisions 'at one remove' from WHO, the stated expectation is that the WHO Foundation will act as an intermediary, insulating the WHO from potential conflicts of interest and reputational risk through a combination of strategic distance from WHO and proximity with its norms and rules of engagement with non-state actors. Yet, whether this model has translated into practice remains understudied. In this article, we focus on emerging institutional practices within the WHO Foundation, highlighting a drift from its stated governance model. Based on analysis of WHO Foundation documents, we demonstrate how due diligence and transparency practices within the Foundation have been redesigned in ways that contradict or subvert its claims to applying alignment with WHO's governance norms, notably relating to its engagement with health harming industries such as alcohol and petrochemical companies. While this situation may seem paradoxical, we argue that, in placing funding decisions 'at one remove' from the formal institutions and structures of WHO, the creation of the Foundation has served to displace this issue to a more secluded arena where drifts in practice are less exposed to political oversight and scrutiny. Focusing on the discursive aspects of this process of depoliticisation, we contend that the Foundation has strategically managed 'fictional expectations' of accountable and transparent governance in order to mitigate concerns about its mandate and functions. This assessment provides new and important insights into the depoliticizing functions of the WHO Foundation and the significant implications this may have for global health governance.

A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding.

In contexts where many people face barriers to accessing gender-affirming care through public systems, some turn to online crowdfunding to fundraise for private care pathways. Crowdfunding platforms invite people to share personal information, stories, and photos publicly, in order to elicit donations. In this article we draw on empirical data from a multimethodological three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a focus on people crowdfunding for medical transition services. We apply a lens of 'visibility' to analysis of focus groups, interviews, case studies, and campaign pages, presenting findings on who was present and absent (with a focus on binary gender, and whiteness), and who was the assumed or expected audience (with a focus on cis publics). We describe how campaigns were defined by efforts to make trans bodies legible, and campaign requests competitive, through reference to narrow and medicalised frames of dysphoria, suffering, and transformation via medical intervention. We contribute to more comparative work in the literature on crowdfunding by highlighting how these globalised digital technologies are situated in the particular (demographic, cultural, and structural) contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand. We call attention to crowdfunding as a relational practice, in which the public marketisation of the self can have both individual consequences related to privacy and outing, and social consequences, in the reinforcing of trans-normativities. Overall we argue that although crowdfunding represents an adaptive strategy for trans people trying meet their own needs, it ultimately contributes to a type of trans-visibility which is both risky and limiting.

LGBTQ+ inequity in crowdfunding cancer costs: The influence of online reach and LGBTQ+ state policy.

BACKGROUND: Emerging literature suggests that LGBTQ+ cancer survivors are more likely to experience financial burden than non-LGBTQ+ survivors. However, LGBTQ+ cancer survivors experience with cost-coping behaviors such as crowdfunding is understudied. METHODS: We aimed to assess LGBTQ+ inequity in cancer crowdfunding by combining community-engaged and technology-based methods. Crowdfunding campaigns were web-scraped from GoFundMe and classified as cancer-related and LGBTQ+ or non-LGBTQ+ using term dictionaries. Bivariate analyses and generalized linear models were used to assess differential effects in total goal amount raised by LGBTQ+ status. Stratified models were run by online reach and LGBTQ+ inclusivity of state policy. RESULTS: A total of N = 188,342 active cancer-related crowdfunding campaigns were web-scraped from GoFundMe in November 2022, of which N = 535 were LGBTQ+ and ranged from 2014 to 2022. In multivariable models of recent campaigns (2019-2022), LGBTQ+ campaigns raised $1608 (95% CI: -2139, -1077) less than non-LGBTQ+ campaigns. LGBTQ+ campaigns with low (26-45 donors), moderate (46-87 donors), and high (88-240 donors) online reach raised on average $1152 (95% CI: -$1589, -$716), $1050 (95% CI: -$1737, -$364), and $2655 (95% CI: -$4312, -$998) less than non-LGBTQ+ campaigns respectively. When stratified by LGBTQ+ inclusivity of state level policy states with anti-LGBTQ+ policy/lacking equitable policy raised on average $1910 (95% CI: -2640, -1182) less than non-LGBTQ+ campaigns from the same states. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Our findings revealed LGBTQ+ inequity in cancer-related crowdfunding, suggesting that LGBTQ+ cancer survivors may be less able to address financial burden via crowdfunding in comparison to non-LGBTQ+ cancer survivors-potentially widening existing economic inequities.

Philanthropic support of academic programs.

Academic surgical departments must subsidize the research mission, as most funded research does not fully support the faculty effort and true costs of the investigation. Most departments support their research program with the margin from clinical revenue; however, increased pressure on clinical income poses a challenge to this strategy. Philanthropy is an increasingly important revenue source to fund academic missions. The opportunities and challenges of this funding source are discussed in this article.

Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms.

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding in terms of the relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised per pitch. We examine heterogeneity in the average amount raised per pitch that is associated with differences across three countries and seven platforms. Using a novel dataset of successful fundraising on the most prominent platforms in the UK, Germany, and the USA, we find the underlying relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised for entrepreneurs is loglinear, with a coefficient less than one and concave to the origin. We identify significant variation in the average amount invested in each pitch across countries and platforms. Our findings have implications for market actors as well as regulators who set competitive frameworks.

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation's philanthropic support for neuropsychiatric research.

In the 36 years since its founding, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) has become one of the world's largest non-government funders of grants for neuropsychiatric research. A number of lessons can be drawn from the BBRF experience. One is that scientific competence in the organization, and full control over selection of grantees, has always resided in a Scientific Council composed of leaders in the field. Fund-raising has been conducted separately, and all public dollars contributed have been used to fund grants. The Council has sought to support the best research, no matter who is doing it or where it is being done. Over 80% of 6300 grants awarded have jump-started the careers of young investigators judged to demonstrate unusual promise. These early-career grants have been the equivalent of seed funding, enabling the best and brightest entrants to the field to perform research that, if successful, can provide a basis for much larger, career-sustaining grants. Much of the funded research has been basic research, although many contributions leading to clinical advances have also resulted from BBRF grants. BBRF has learned that it pays to have a diversified research portfolio, with thousands of grantees attacking the problem of mental illness from many different angles. The Foundation's experience also demonstrates the power of patient-inspired philanthropic support. Donors repeatedly express satisfaction that some aspect of mental illness that they care deeply about is being addressed, and find comfort and support from the sense of joining with others in the mission.

Investigating Racial Disparities in Cancer Crowdfunding: A Comprehensive Study of Medical GoFundMe Campaigns.

BACKGROUND: In recent years, there has been growing concern about prejudice in crowdfunding; however, empirical research remains limited, particularly in the context of medical crowdfunding. This study addresses the pressing issue of racial disparities in medical crowdfunding, with a specific focus on cancer crowdfunding on the GoFundMe platform. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate racial disparities in cancer crowdfunding using average donation amount, number of donations, and success of the fundraising campaign as outcomes. METHODS: Drawing from a substantial data set of 104,809 campaigns in the United States, we used DeepFace facial recognition technology to determine racial identities and used regression models to examine racial factors in crowdfunding performance. We also examined the moderating effect of the proportion of White residents on crowdfunding bias and used 2-tailed t tests to measure the influence of racial anonymity on crowdfunding success. Owing to the large sample size, we set the cutoff for significance at P<.001. RESULTS: In the regression and supplementary analyses, the racial identity of the fundraiser significantly predicted average donations (P<.001), indicating that implicit bias may play a role in donor behavior. Gender (P=.04) and campaign description length (P=.62) did not significantly predict the average donation amounts. The race of the fundraiser was not significantly associated with the number of donations (P=.42). The success rate of cancer crowdfunding campaigns, although generally low (11.77%), showed a significant association with the race of the fundraiser (P<.001). After controlling for the covariates of the fundraiser gender, fundraiser age, local White proportion, length of campaign description, and fundraising goal, the average donation amount to White individuals was 17.68% higher than for Black individuals. Moreover, campaigns that did not disclose racial information demonstrated a marginally higher average donation amount (3.92%) than those identified as persons of color. Furthermore, the racial composition of the fundraiser's county of residence was found to exert influence (P<.001); counties with a higher proportion of White residents exhibited reduced racial disparities in crowdfunding outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to a deeper understanding of racial disparities in cancer crowdfunding. It highlights the impact of racial identity, geographic context, and the potential for implicit bias in donor behavior. As web-based platforms evolve, addressing racial inequality and promoting fairness in health care financing remain critical goals. Insights from this research suggest strategies such as maintaining racial anonymity and ensuring that campaigns provide strong evidence of deservingness. Moreover, broader societal changes are necessary to eliminate the financial distress that drives individuals to seek crowdfunding support.