Appeal to the head and heart: The persuasive effects of medical crowdfunding charitable appeals on willingness to donate

Abstract Medical crowdfunding helps low-income patients raise money for medical treatment and has grown tremendously in recent years. The most appropriate messaging strategy for writing charitable appeals to attract donations remains unclear. This study fills this gap by drawing on Aristotle's three modes of persuasion to explore factors affecting willingness to donate to medical crowdfunding projects from three aspects: logos, pathos, and ethos. This study adopted a multi-method approach by conducting two laboratory experiments (N = 125 and N = 123) and a field study (N = 1645). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) in Study 1 showed that high information quality (F = 9.774, p = 0.002) and gain frame (F = 8.620, p = 0.004) have positive effects on the trustworthiness of the project initiator (ethos), which in turn promoting potential donors’ willingness to donate (β = 0.339, p = 0.001). Study 2 confirmed the findings about information quality in Study 1, and further show that there was no significant difference between gain-first and gain-last frame on trustworthiness and willingness to donate (p > 0.05). Then, information quality is further detailed into three sub-dimensions in Study 3: text length, number of images, and number of health-related words. The results of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with robust standard error indicate that the text length (β = 0.350, p