Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how crowdfunding platforms harness the intimacy capabilities of modern technology to help NGOs fundraise online. By leveraging existing emotional bonds among individuals, platforms promote peer-to-peer models to financialize interpersonal relationships into donor transactions.

Paper long abstract:

While development practice has often been a story of emotions and power, few cases demonstrate this more prominently than that of crowdfunding platforms. Recently emerged onto the international development space as transformative fundraising tools for individuals and NGOs, crowdfunding platforms leverage the 'feelingful ties' (Moodie, 2013) that connect individuals in pursuit of NGO fundraising. This paper focuses on field research conducted with crowdfunding platforms GlobalGiving (US) and LetzChange (India). I explore how platforms train NGO staff to market their projects in digitally impactful ways using various 'currencies' (Schwittay, 2014) such as compelling imagery and language on their websites, social media, and messaging applications like WhatsApp.

Through the cases of GlobalGiving and LetzChange, I demonstrate the power of what I call 'intimate technologies'— the modern technological tools that recreate affective social bonds and social capital in digital spaces. By encouraging local Indian NGO staff to capitalize on their relationships with existing networks by asking for donations, crowdfunding platforms are creating a new level of financialized power dynamics between individual actors. While one can argue that altruistic endeavors such as non-profit fundraising result in positive emotional associations, NGO staff also grapple with their complicity in creating enduring social and financial inequalities within their own personal spheres. In this paper, I analyse the successes of various affective fundraising strategies platforms suggest to their NGO partners, while simultaneously critiquing how these innovative new practices are in fact quite emotionally and socially exploitative of both the NGO staff and their networks.