Abstract: 

Online medical crowdfunding has become essential for individuals seeking financial support for healthcare expenses. However, fundraising outcomes often fall short and vary significantly across campaigns, partly due to differences in campaign design elements. In digital environments saturated with subtle multimodal cues—particularly visual and textual elements—understanding how these cues influence user attention and prosocial behavior is increasingly important. Despite their prevalence, the individual and interactive effects of such cues on donation behavior remain underexplored. This study theorizes how visual and textual design features shape donor responses using an attention-directing perspective. Specifically, we examine the role of direct eye gaze in images and narrativity in textual descriptions—two cues that independently guide attention toward the self or the narrative world, thereby activating distinct prosocial motivations. Using a large-scale dataset of 59,000 medical crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe (2017–2019), we find that both direct eye gaze and narrativity positively influence campaign outcomes. However, their joint presence results in a negative interaction: the presence of direct eye gaze diminishes the effectiveness of narrativity. We attribute this to attentional conflict arising from limited cognitive resources, where competing cues may overload viewers’ attention. Importantly, follow-up analyses indicate that this negative interaction disappears when the campaign clearly conveys a severe medical condition but becomes more pronounced in campaigns that reference low-risk conditions or omit medical details altogether. These results suggest that the interaction between visual and textual cues depends heavily on information salience, which influences the degree of cognitive constraint. These findings deepen the understanding of subtle digital design strategies in prosocial contexts and offer practical guidance for fundraisers and platform designers seeking to optimize campaign effectiveness through visual and textual elements.

Short Bio: 

Prof. Ravichandran's long-term research interests focus on digital strategies of firms and the mechanisms through which digitization is transforming firms, markets, supply networks and industries. His research has been funded by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Ministry of Education, Singapore. He has published extensively in leading scholarly journals in Information Systems (Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly; European Journal of Information Systems, Information Technology Management), Decision Sciences (Decision Sciences; Logistics Information Systems) Strategic Management (Organization Science), Technology Management (IEEE Transaction on Engineering Management, Journal of High Technology Management Research,) as well as in leading practitioner journals (Communications of the ACM).

His research has won several awards including the 1) Best Paper, IT and Healthcare Track, International Conference in Information Systems, 2019; 2) Best Information Systems Publication in 2010 (Association of Information System); 3) Best Published Paper Award, 2010 (Information Systems Research); 4) Best Paper Award, Software Technology Track (HICSS, 2010); 5) Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2007); 6) Best Academic Paper Award (Second Supply Chain Management Symposium, McMaster University, 2004); 7) Best Paper Award (OCIS Division, Academy of Management, 2001).