Philanthropic crowdfunding has been laden with emotions, in particular compassion. Compassion as an other-oriented emotion not only drives donation behavior, but also motivates compassion organizing from donors. We expand the outcome scope of crowdfunding from success rate to compassion organizing and interrogate what factors in philanthropic crowdfunding campaigns transform donors into secondary organizers who act upon the campaigns not only by donating but also by mobilizing others’ donation behaviors. Drawing on the theory of compassion organizing, we conducted an exploratory study with BERTopic and a mixed-effect linear regression on a novel dataset (N = 69,406) from a leading philanthropic crowdfunding platform. Our study highlights the important roles of emotions in visuals and texts, the linguistic clarity and richness and the legitimacy of backing foundations in driving compassion organizing. This study makes novel contributions to crowdfunding studies and compassion organizing by introducing a new dimension into the scope of crowdfunding outcomes and identifying the key antecedents of compassion organizing.
