Enhancing Digital Fundraising: The Impact of Charity Streams on Streamer Engagement and Donor Behavior

Abstract

Motivated by incorporating charity streams on live streaming platforms, we investigate how adopting charity streams impacts streamers’ engagement and economic performance. Our setting is on a live streaming platform, Twitch, which launched its charity tool to enable viewers to choose between supporting streamers directly or donating to charities easily. Using a combination of coarsened exact matching and a staggered difference-in-differences estimation model, our initial findings indicate that charity streams enhance streamer viewership and followers and potentially increase donations to streamers and charities. The study fills a gap in understanding the strategic use of influencers for fundraising, offering practical insights for influencers on harmonizing prosocial activities to build their image and engage their audience.

Keywords: live streaming, creator economy, charity, user-generated content