During the COVID-19 epidemic, the methods charitable organizations employ in mobilizing resources and address emergent natural and social disasters have become a global issue. We review previous studies that focus on nonprofit resource acquisition, exploring different mediating roles of legitimacy in the acquisition of charitable donations to differentiate the effects and underlying mechanisms of two commonly intertwined nonprofit strategies (i.e. building self-capacity and collaborating with public institutions). A total of 1131 national-sampled individual questionnaire was collected from respondents during the early COVID-19 outbreak, in which results showed that enhancing organizational self-capacity was more effective in attracting donations compared with collaborating with public institutions. The results of mediation analysis provided empirical evidence, showing that regulatory and cognitive legitimacy played positive mediating roles in the relationship between organizational capacity and donation propensity.

legitimacy, charitable donation, self-capacity, organizational collaboration