Stress and Support Present in Medical Crowdfunding in Pediatric Cancer

Medical crowdfunding (MCF) seeks to mitigate the financial harm to families with a child with cancer.

We sought to describe the illness phases, campaign creators, and the main topics discussed on MCF pages.

Using publicly available campaigns on GoFundMe.com, we randomly selected 100 campaigns to extract information on stressors, appraisals, and additional attributes. We conducted descriptive statistics to describe the distributions of illness phases, creators, and topics, and Fisher's exact test to explore patterns in topics by illness phase and topics by creators. Primary therapy was the most common illness phase (75%), and friend or family of the child with cancer was the most common campaign creator (76%). In 30/76 friend or family creators, a parent posted updates. The most common financial stressors were deductibles/co-pay costs (60%), employment disruptions (58%), and treatment-related travel (47%). Nearly all campaigns mentioned non-financial stressors including describing the illness (88%) and the path to diagnosis (86%). Most campaigns included a tertiary appraisal of worthiness to explain why their child (75%) or the family (49%) was worthy of donations. Most campaigns provided emotional support (84%), few provided peer support (22%), and even fewer provided informational support (10%). There were many significant differences in topics by type of creator and few by illness phase.

Friends and family are most active in creating campaigns near the beginning of a child's cancer journey. Campaigners share information both to update and to convince donors to support them. Future work should explore the consequences of parents engaging in MCF.