Getting the crowd to care: Marketing illness through health-related crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand

Campaigns for personal health expenses make up the largest and fastest-growing segment of donation-based crowdfunding. Set against the backdrop of retrenchment and disinvestment in public healthcare systems across the global North, health-related crowdfunding is a way to navigate increasingly marketised systems of social reproduction. Despite high profile success stories, campaigns vary significantly in their ability to capture the hearts, and ultimately wallets, of donors. While existing analyses of online campaign pages offer some insight into the marketing of healthcare needs, far less is known about practices and experiences of crowdfunding platform users, including campaigners. Bringing literature on crowdfunding together with accounts of the marketisation of care, our paper asks: how do campaigners work to secure crowdfunded healthcare? Through the accounts of 15 people campaigning on behalf of family or friends in Aotearoa New Zealand, we show how attempts to appeal to donors depend on campaigners’ abilities to ‘market’ illness and need in ways that resonate with the crowd. We have two main foci. First, we examine the responsibility and responsibilisation of campaigners to engage and perform accountability to crowdfunders. Second, we show how campaigners mobilise recipients’ traits of deservingness and other culturally favoured personal qualities to appeal to the crowd's perceived predilections. In sum, the paper demonstrates how the use of crowdfunding is both necessitated by the marketisation of healthcare while simultaneously exerting its own form of market discipline.