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In online peer-to-peer fundraising, individual fundraisers, acting on behalf of nonprofit organizations, mobilize their social networks using social media to request donations. Whereas existing studies focus on networks of donors to explain success, we examine the role of the networks of fundraisers and their effect on fundraising outcomes. By drawing on social capital and network theories, we investigate how social capital derived from social media networks and fundraising groups explains individual fundraising success. Using the Movember health campaign on Twitter as an empirical context, we find that fundraising success is associated with a moderate level of centrality in social media networks and moderate group network size. In addition, we find that fundraisers interact only marginally on social media but prefer to connect with each other outside these platforms and engage in group fundraising. Our article contributes to research on fundraising and social networks and provides recommendations for practice.

This study examines how the interplay between an online campaign’s network structure and prosocial cultural norms in a country affect charitable giving. We conducted a multilevel analysis that includes Twitter network and aggregated donation data from the 2013 Movember fundraising campaigns in 24 countries during 62 campaign days. Prosocial cultural norms did not affect the relationship between network size and average donations raised, nor did they affect the relationship between network centralization and average donation amount. Prosocial cultural norms did affect the relationship between network density and average donations raised. However, this effect was negative and contrary to our expectation.

Social movement organizations widely use social media to organize collective action for social change, such as cancer awareness campaigns. However, little is known about how effective online social movement campaigns are at generating social change by translating online action into meaningful (offline) action. This dissertation examines the micro-mobilization dynamics at play that can explain the effectiveness of online social movement campaigns. This book comprises seven chapters presenting research based on a multidisciplinary, mixed-meethod approach combining theories and methods from sociology, social psychology, communication science, and computational social science. The findings show that, by looking at the micro-mobilization dynamics of collective action, we can gain an important understanding of the mechanisms at work during online social movement campaigns and of the effectiveness of such campaigns in fostering communication processes related to the cause, obtaining important resources for the cause, developing a collective identity, and raising awareness.