Events

Ms. Martina Pocchiari
Doctoral Candidate in Quantitative Marketing
Rotterdam School of Management
Erasmus University Rotterdam

Shared-interest communities generate tremendous functional, hedonic, and social-psychological benefits for their members, by offering community-organized activities. Increasingly, community organizers are offering digitized activities to their members. Digitized activities – which include webinars, webcasts, and live conferences – are often less expensive and more accessible than in-person activities. At the same time, these digitized activities may not always provide the same degree of social and psychological benefits to the participants as their in-person counterparts. The tension between convenience and meaningful social interactions may lead to higher or lower community participation. We investigate how increasing the extent of digitization of community activities impacts community participation, using data from the event-based community platform Meetup.com. Using both parametric and non-parametric models, we find that increasing the extent of activity digitization decreases members’ intentions to attend such events. A counterfactual analysis shows that completely digitizing in-person activities causes an average 1.3% decrease in positive RSVPs. Furthermore, we find that the effect is heterogeneous across communities and events. In particular, the heterogeneity in the effect of digitization can be explained by group- and event-level factors related to social presence, financial commitments, and the extent of information provided to members regarding the event. This research contributes to the growing literature on the effects of digitizing human interactions on people’s behavior in social groups. The study also informs community managers who need to evaluate the consequences of increasing the digitization of their communities.