Cybersecurity and Social Media Networks for Donations: An Empirical Investigation of Triad of Trust, Commitment, and Loyalty

Introduction

Most authors have studied donations to profit organizations (Wan et al., 2017; Lawson-Body et al., 2018; Xiao & Yue, 2021). Initially, individuals and entrepreneurs used online donations to collect small-sized investments from crowds to finance for-profit ventures (Xiao & Yue, 2021). Still, there is a paradigm shift because online donations via social media networks are used to collect significant funds to support non-profit causes. Additionally, the momentum created by online donations has triggered the creation of many virtual organizations like GoFundMe, which collected approximately $70 million in a few weeks to fight the propagation of COVID-19 (Xiao & Yue, 2021). As an alternative, many private organizations use their online charitable donation platforms to collect online donations to support social causes.

However, an increasingly growing number of criminal activities are recorded and reported on social media networks daily. As a result, donors’ identities and belongings have been stolen after they financially contribute to donations via social media networks. These fundamental issues of social media networks negatively impact donors’ financial involvement in our communities and philanthropy.

In a different vein, the exponential development of these social media platforms surprised information technologies (IT) scholars and researchers; therefore, only very few of them have studied this phenomenon. For instance, Xiao & Yue (2021) jointly examined donors’ donations and latent attrition. They also pointed out that a critical challenge for online non-profit donation platforms is the problem of donor retention. Moreover, recent research that examines secure social media effects on social relationships cannot provide clear conclusions about how charitable organizations use social media platforms to communicate with their donors because of mixed findings (Kahai & Lei, 2019). Even though some scholars have linked retention to loyalty (Ju & Jang, 2023), the existing research has not adequately addressed other major and significant problems, such as donor trust and commitment and how they are connected to appropriate cybersecurity and efficient social media-presence of charitable organizations. Specifically, the existing studies could not address some key challenges that slow down the momentum of online donations in our societies. These key challenges are the opportunities created for hackers because of inappropriate cybersecurity protections and inadequate social media-presence. This current research fills these gaps in the literature.

Therefore, our paper answers three research questions (RQ). First, could the donors give more if they trust that the recipient organization uses secure social media? Second, do the donors desire to maintain long-lasting committed relationships with the charitable organization because of its success on social media? Third, do the donors show evidence of likeliness to repeat their behavior with a given organization through its effective social media and cybersecurity management?

This paper provides an effective research design for fixing these challenges and solving problems associated with online charitable donation platforms. This study aims to expand the theory of reasoned action (TRA) with donor trust, donor commitment, and donor loyalty to investigate cybersecurity and social media-presence and their mediated impacts on the intention to donate. Most importantly, it draws from TRA, the theory of routine activity, and the social presence theory to explore integrating cybersecurity and social media-presence into the intention to donate.

As a result, this paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the extension of the TRA with trust, commitment, and loyalty in altruism donations. Additionally, it highlights the mediating roles of cybersecurity and social media-presence in the context of behavioral intention to donate more to nonprofit organizations. Moreover, it stresses the complementarity among TRA, social presence, and routine activity theories.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the existing literature and theoretical backgrounds. In section 3, we present the research model and hypotheses. In section 4, we outline the research method. In section 5, we expose data analysis and results. In section 6, we outline the discussion. In the last section, 7, we report on the conclusion.