The challenge of motivating potential donors to contribute is the primary hurdle to the success of online charitable crowdfunding. Anchoring on warm glow theory, we investigate how fundraisers’ self-donations influence donors to contribute to online charitable crowdfunding projects and examine the underlying mechanism through activating potential donors’ warm glow feeling. Using a large-scale dataset from a leading crowdfunding platform in China and a laboratory experiment, we find that fundraisers’ self-donations have a significant positive impact on potential donors’ contributions through developing their warm glow feeling. Our results show that charitable crowdfunding projects with fundraisers’ self-donations perform better in attracting donations from donors. Fundraisers’ self-donations not only improve the probability of success for charitable crowdfunding projects but also facilitates the collection of additional donations. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.