Dec 9 teamwork #9 final paper (1)

Social media news feed impact on a person’s willingness to donate

SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS FEED IMPACT ON A PERSON’S WILLINGNESS TO DONATE 1
Problem Statement
How might seeing charity donations from different users on a social media news feed impact a
person’s willingness to donate to charity?
Introduction
In the last decade, social media has become an available tool for online charity donations.
Facebook, Twitter, GoFundMe.com are few of the platforms on which individuals or
communities can partake in fundraising efforts. Saxton and Wang (2014) explain how the social
network effect, an organization’s network of followers, play a huge role in the success of
charitable donations where the circle of online friends in social networks helps promote causes.
Friends in the circles see potential donor responses to a charity on social media influencing
recipient of solicitation to support a cause friend, or colleague supports, analogous to the social
pressure board members often feel to donate (Galaskiewicz, 1997).
Celebrity ambassadors or celebrity spokespersons, celebrity endorsers are used by
charities and nonprofit organizations to promote desired audience outcomes like reducing
poverty (Samman et al. 2009). For charity donations, Wymer and Drollinger (2015) discuss the
influence of different celebrity endorser attributes on respondents’ intentions to donate to charity
and found admirability to be used as celebrity endorser attribute influence. Previous research
have noted the causational effect of friends and celebrities on charity donation however little
research have attribute how much influence between the two groups have on an audience for
charity donations (Saxton & Wang, 2014; Wymer & Drollinger, 2015). To reduce this gap in our
knowledge, the primary purpose of this research is to add to our understanding of the relationship

between peer or friend and celebrity influence on a major audience outcome, an audience’s
intention to donate to charity. This research may drive how non-profits or other charities can
navigate and target social media strategies to increase charity donations.
Our study was conducted using digital prototypes of a fictitious payments app, called
PayNoww (a digital wallet app that allows users to send payments, book event tickets, and
donates) to analyze donation willingness and measure charitable contributions. The fictitious app
was modeled after Venmo, a digital wallet app that allows users to make, share and split
payments with friends. The PayNoww prototype simulates a news feed of social activity of
different users and activities. This prototype allowed us to determine the extent to which
donations on social media are driven by social activities of friends, strangers, and celebrities. We
argue that social media activity of friends and celebrities on our PayNoww news feeds will alter
a person’s will to donate, with friends, rather than celebrities being the most prominent influence
to an individual.
Background/Lit Review
How social media influences us
Social media plays a huge role in many of our daily lives. Our networks on social media
expand frequently. Every time we add or accept a new friend or follower request, we expand our
social network. A five-year study by Althoff, Jindal, & Leskovec (2017) explained how social
networks can influence user behavior in a physical activity tracking application. The study
showed how social networks lead to a significant increase in online and offline activities. They
established a causal effect where new social connections increased user online in-application

activity by 30%, user retention by 17%, and user offline real-world physical activity (walking
steps) by 7%. Saxton and Wang (2014) explained how fundraising success is related to not an
organization’s financial capacity but it’s Web capacity. The study found a strong relationship
between the size of an organization’s social network and the number of charitable contributions.
Social pressure from an individual’s social network was found to be the driving force of donation
decisions on Facebook. They also argued that social media fundraising is especially well
received in health-related causes that reflect immediate needs or benefits the general public. In
China, organ donation campaigns through the use of social media have shown an increase in
organ donor consent rates (She & Salmon, 2018).
Peathean, Tiropanis & Harris (2014), investigated conversations on social media as a
method of ascertaining the extent to which supporters were engaging with charities in a way that
reflected that supporters had a strong relationship. In the study their focus analyzed
conversations as signs of relationships being developed, which have previously in other studies
had been shown as to be a key target for charities on social media. The study suggested that the
ways in which supporters engage with charities differs between Facebook and Twitter. The
authors argued that there was evidence to back their proposal that Facebook could be better for
posting messages to encourage a known supporter-base to respond, whereas Twitter appeared to
be a more valuable for discovering unsolicited mentions and accounts of support from any users
on the network (Peathean, Tiropanis & Harris, 2014). They found that social media appeared to
facilitate relationship development, and there is a portion of charities’ supporter-base that was
keen to respond and communicate on social media through their qualitative study.

How kindness or public action cascades
In network dynamics, individual contribution enhanced or facilitated the spread of
cooperation (Fowler & Nicholas, 2010). Laboratory experiments of a public goods game suggest
that cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks. “Furthermore, this influence
persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person
to person to person)” (Fowler & Nicholas, 2010).
Hogben & Cownie (2017) discussed qualitative methods to investigate if the social
observability of online charitable participation influences future interactions with the same
charity. They explained how social pressure played a huge role in participation in social giving.
They proposed that people are concerned about their impressions and how others see them.
Furthermore, their results showed that having an affinity with the cause lead to higher donations
and increased subsequent behavior of giving with the same charity, including spreading
charities’ messages to others.
Online Charity Participation
Meer (2011) studied the magnitude of peer pressure in charitable giving when driven by
shared attributes between individuals. Meer analyzed data from a university to determine if
alumni were more likely to donate and to donate larger amounts when they are solicited by
someone with whom they have social ties. Additionally, a solicitor's request was much more
effective if he or she shared characteristics, such as race, with the alumnus being solicited.
Reyniers, Diane and Bhalla, Richa (2013) explored how peer pressure in donations can
bring out reluctant altruism. Participants were divided into individuals(control group) and in
pairs (treatment group). Average donations in the treatment group were significantly higher than

in the control group. Those in pairs (treatment group) revealed their donation decision to each
other and had an opportunity to revise their donation decision after discussion. Overall, subjects
were happier with their decision when their donations were larger, but those in pairs (treatment
group) were less happy and controlled for the amount donated. These findings suggested
reluctant altruism due to peer pressure in charitable giving.
Cameron et al (2013) investigated how novel applications of social media may increase
organ donation rates. They studied the impact of Facebook’s organ donor initiative which was
launched on May 1, 2012. Facebook altered its platform to allow members to specify ‘‘Organ
Donor’’ as part of their profile. Upon such choice, members were offered a link to their state
registry to complete an official designation, and their ‘‘friends’’ in the network were made aware
of the new status as a donor. Educational links regarding donation were offered to those
considering the new organ donor status. On the first day, there were 13,054 new online
registrations, representing a 21-fold increase over the baseline average of 616 registrations. This
first- day effect ranged from 6.9 (Michigan) to 108.9 (Georgia). Registration rates remained
elevated in the following 12 days. During the same time period, no increase was seen in
registrations from the DMV.
Hypotheses
In our literature review earlier on social media and charitable donations, we introduced a
series of ideas about the relationship between social networks, social pressure, cooperative
behavior, and donation. Through peer pressure, we understand the recipient of a solicitation to
support a cause that a family member, friend, or colleague supports (Meer, 2011). Celebrities
also impact audience donation intentions (Wymer and Drollinger, 2014). We posit that

differences in endorser type, with friends being the greatest influence to alter an individual’s will
to donate, as opposed to strangers or celebrities. From the three categorical endorser types
through the PayNoww prototype, an activity news feed with a participant’s friends will receive
more donation amount and selection of donation over other two endorsed types. This research
will uncover the gap and identify the relationship between peer or friend and celebrity influence
on the audience’s intention to donate to charity.
H1: The presence of donations from friends in the social media prototype news feed will be more
effective in increasing the likelihood of participant’s action to donate.
H2: The presence of donations from celebrities in the social media prototype news feed will be
more effective in increasing the likelihood of participant’s action to donate
H0 (Null): The presence of donations from friends and celebrities in the social media prototype
news feed will not change the likelihood of participant’s action to donate.
Methods
The research aimed to explore whether charity donations from different users on social
media news feeds, impact a person’s willingness to donate to charity. It adopted a
methodological approach which addressed three research objectives:
1. To explore the nature of charity donations through social media participation;
2. To investigate the possible connection between the desire to participate in social media
donation and influence of friends, strangers or celebrity;

3. To explore which types of online charity participation motivates future willingness to
donate
Independent Variable
We included two variables to serve as influencers in an individual's social network. The
first variable was Facebook friends. Friends from the participant’s Facebook profile were
included on the prototype and listed on the feed through various activities like donating to a
cause, going to a concert or an event. The second variable was famous celebrities and
philanthropists. Examples include a popular actor like Leonardo Dicaprio donating for a cause.
The control group only included strangers in the newsfeed where we showed a random person on
the feed who donated recently for a cause.
Dependent Variable
Our dependent variable, donation willingness was measured by the count of button clicks
and donation amount in dollars among each participant in the three groups: famous celebrities,
friends, and strangers.
Task Design
We conducted a pilot study on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) and
Qualtrics (www.qualtrics.com), to gauge the feasibility of using the platform for the study.
Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that pays workers to complete small,
computer-based human intelligence tasks (HITs). But later discovered, Mturk is good only for
blackbox studies where we are not collecting any personal data. For this experiment we did need
participants’ facebook profile page to randomize the treatment exposure in the friends group. So,

we shifted our experiment scope on reaching out to participants through Facebook posts and
allocating participants into random groups. This helped us overcome participant bias and
experiment bias. We collected data over using qualtrics, google sites, maze and google forms.
The experiment used the concept of using a fictional payments app called PayNoww. A
high fidelity interactive Invision alternative prototype was created to simulate the experience of
booking events and donating to a cause on the home feed (social newsfeed). We distributed a
Google Sites page with the prototype along with pre and post survey links to each participant.
Each participant’s PayNoww account was credited with USD 30 which was informed at the
beginning of the experiment.
The prototype was modified for each participant group:
● The stranger's group was given a prototype where the feed showed strangers
sending money and booking event tickets and donating to a cause (syrian war).
● The celebrity group had an celebrity, in this case, Leonardo Dicaprio, a
well-known philanthropist, donating to a cause (syrian war).
● The friend's group’s prototype was modified by including a friend from their
Facebook friends list donating to a cause (syrian war).

PayNoww design
Two different surveys were included in this experiment. Each participant was required to
participate in a pre-survey followed by interaction with the Invision prototype. The participant’s
interactions with the prototype were tracked through an analytic tool called Maze. At the end of
the session, each participant was given a code that they had to paste in the post-survey to validate
if they completed the usability study of the prototype. After the completion of the usability study,
participants were requested to take a post-survey.
Pre Survey
The pre-survey collected demographic information. The participants were asked to
provide their gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, and family income.
Post-Survey
The post-survey asked participants how much amount they donated out of the USD 30
provided in their virtual wallet.

Parameters of tasks
Participants’ responses were filtered and curated by following parameters:
1. Each participant account could only submit one response to one task
2. Each IP address can only submit one response to one task
3. Participants were restricted within groups to U.S. and Indian citizens over the age of 18 years
4. Participants were randomly assigned groups to test the survey and prototype
Procedure
During the experiment, our aim was to collect 10 responses for each task. We simply
contacted participants for the study providing them a link to a google site which comprised of (1)
Instructions (2) the pre-survey (3) Maze prototype link and (4) the post survey. Each participant
was randomly assigned the groups and we had 3 different sites for each group.

Fg. Design of google site
Method for User Evaluation
Participants
A sample of 30 screened participants was curated. We collected demographic data through the
pre-survey where we asked participants about their age, gender, marital status, education level,
and their annual family income. The gender distribution was a little skewed as 56% of our
participants were males. 86% of the participants were of Asian descent. 63% belonged in the age
range of 25-34. All of the participants had at least a 4-year bachelor's degree. We observed that
the income level of the participant varied all over from >$10000 to <150,000.

Maze
Maze Design is a cloud based prototype analytics tool, which tracks participants’ interactions
with the prototype. It helps to define and collect actionable insights. In this experiment Maze was
used to verify if the participants are truly going through the prototype. It helped us in eliminating
any outliers in the study. It was also interesting to see how many clicks were performed and how
much time it took for participants to go through the prototype.
Heatmaps of clicks on Maze
Results
The experiment examined prototype interactions of 30 participants. These 30 participants were
divided in three groups of 10. For these three groups our were testing was based on how friends,
strangers and celebrity influence willingness to donate. Later, we examined how much amount

participants in each group donated. We interpreted that we will require two separate tests. One
which will calculate the willingness to donate among the three groups and another for analyzing
the donation amount. We used Chi-square test for willingness to donate and One-Way ANOVA
to analyze the donation amount.
Analyzing willingness to donate
The data analysis highlighted that the number of donations were higher in the influencer group
compared to the other groups. The Chi-square test yielded a statistically insignificant p-value of
0.62 which confirmed our preliminary findings. To determines the association strength we ran
Cramer’s V test and got a value of 0.18 signifying a weak association. For the donation amount,

we observed that the mean donation amount was higher in the friend's group compared to the
other two groups.
Analyzing donation amount(through each group)
One Way Anova determines whether there are any statistically significant differences between
the means of two or more independent groups. We used it because we had three groups for
comparing the amount of donation. We ran the One-way ANOVA test on our data to confirm our
findings. However, the test yielded a p-value of 0.71 which indicated that our findings were
statistically insignificant. We claim that the reason for result being statistically insignificant is
because the sample size was smaller.

Discussion
Contributions of Research
Previous studies have only established the effect of using celebrity endorsers (Wymer &
Drollinger, 2015) or using peer motivation to drive charity (Reyniers, & Bhalla, 2013), but not
the magnitude of influence when participant's friends are stacked against a celebrity endorser.
This study was unable to contribute to our understanding the magnitude of influence a friend or
celebrity has towards a participant’s intention to donate to charity. We still do not have a better
understanding of the differences in peer influence versus celebrity influence.
Peer Influence and Celebrity Influence
A previous study examined peer pressure and peer influence (Saxton & Wang, 2014).
The study indicates peers as influencers to donation intent. Yet, in our study we were not able to
prove this to be true. Peer influence, was not a significant moderator of participants’ donation
intentions. The same applied to celebrity influence. Celebrities are said to influence audiences
and their admirability and expertise are moderatoring facts to audience donation intentions
(Wymer & Drollinger, 2015). Celebrity influence, was not a significant moderator of
participants’ donation intentions. Since both peer and celebrity influence were not significant
moderators to participant’s intention to donate we were unable to identify the magnitude of
influence between the two. Our study also contradicts previous research. However this could be
due to our limitations, discussed below.

Limitation
This study was cross-sectional, rather than longitudinal. The treatment exposure of
celebrity and peer endsoment was not repeated. The cross-sectional study could be repeated to
enhance effect of repetitive exposure over time. Associative learning would be useful in
understanding how peer and celebrity endorsement alter donation intentions over time.
Our research was limited by the selection of Facebook friends for the peer influence
group. In the study, we measured peer exposure through random selection of Facebook friends.
However, Facebook friends varies from strangers request to personal family and friend
acceptances. It is possible the selection of facebook friends chosen had varied effects on each
participants.
Other limitation include subjectivity biases for the celebrity treatment group. Our
research limited participant’s exposure to one celebrity, Leonardo Dicaprio. It should be taken
into account that this study did not determine how individual celebrities are more influential than
others. It is possible that certain celebrity endorsers have varied effects on each participants
which can lead to erroneous results. Another potential limitations of the method could be real
world data gathering compared to data gathered from a prototype. Cameron et al (2013) used
Facebook as a platform to analyse increase in organ donations. A mature, frequently used
platform provides a neutral ground for testing the hypotheses.

We observed that most of the other prior research had larger sample sizes. Wymer and
Drollinger (2015) had a total of 228 participants completed their online questionnaire and study.
In Saxton and Wang (2014), 66 participants are analyzed. Our sample size of 30 participants is
another limiting factor. Our goal for this study, was about recruiting minimum of 60 participants
through Mechanical Turk. Our prediction was having minimum of 60 participants would have
had the data represented as statistically significant. When carrying out our pilot study we realized
that Mturk is good for blackbox studies where we are not collecting any personal data. Asking
for personal data for our Facebook group did not seem viable. So, we decided to take a smaller
pool of participants for our study.
Conclusion and Future Research
This study investigated social media and willingness to donate. The descriptive survey
research design was adopted in the study with the interactive mockup PayNoww. A sample of 30
respondents was selected from a population. A simple random sampling technique was used for
the selection, where ten participants for the each group was selected. The data collected were
analyzed with the use of descriptive statistics of frequency count and percentage, and the
hypotheses were tested using the inferential statistics of Chi-square and One-Way Anova at 0.05
level of significance. The result from the findings of this study showed that, though Social media
can be influential for donations, we discovered that both peer and celebrity were not found to be
significant moderators on participant’s intention to donate. We would caution against
interpreting our finding to mean that peer and celebrity have no moderating effect. As previous
studies have point the opposite to be true (Saxton & Wang, 2014; Wymer & Drollinger, 2015) .

The magnitude effect between moderating effect of peer and celebrity influence needs to be
explored in future research.
In this study, we relied on Facebook friends from peers as moderating variable to inform
participants of peer endorsement. We randomly selected one peer as the endorser. However, it is
unknown the strength of friendship and influence of one peer stacked against multiple peers.
Could two or three peer endorsers, be used in tandem for greater effectiveness?
In the study, we relied on participants’ prior familiarity with celebrities like Leonardo
Dicaprio to inform their intention. While Leonardo Dicaprio is widely known it may be not
perceived by all. Would it be useful to use co-endorsers or stack multiple celebrities for
endorsement? Could multiple celebrities bolster participant’s intention to donate.
Future research could include attitudes towards charity as an outcome variable. The
prototype may have a direct effect and change on participant’s attitude towards charity. The
attitude change may result in future behavioral responses to support charity such as future
donation, volunteering, favorable referrals, as consequence of multiple exposures to charity’s
appeals and endorsements over time. It would be then useful to measure participant responses to
volunteering and referrals.

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