Exploring the donation allocation of online charitable crowdfunding based on topical and spatial analysis: Evidence from the Tencent GongYi

Abstract Online charitable crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular approach for online fundraising and has attracted widespread concern in society. However, little is known about donation allocation in the implementation of online charitable crowdfunding, especially the purposes involved and the specific flows of these donations. To this end, this study aims to explore project initiators’ fundraising allocation by identifying latent intentions from a large sample of project descriptions and by uncovering spatial patterns in the flow of cross-regional donations. By collecting data from the Tencent GongYi platform, one of the largest government-authorized online crowdfunding platforms in China, we conducted a comparative analysis of four types of crowdfunding projects (i.e., medical, educational, poverty-related, and environmental) to examine differences in their general characteristics and donation allocation. The findings suggest that the success rates for these four different types of online charitable crowdfunding vary and that the key influencing factor among them is the type of project executors. Most of the donations are used to fund children and older adults, especially for neglected children in rural areas and neglected elders. In terms of the spatial analysis of the different categories of charitable crowdfunding projects, the results also reveal that the flow of online donations is not equitably distributed and tends to be concentrated in a few relatively developed regions. Specifically, eastern China, with a higher GDP, receives more donations than western China, with a lower GDP. Our research contributes to a better understanding of the donation allocation of online charitable crowdfunding and points to some general implications for online charitable crowdfunding research and practice globally.