Could Government Measures Crowd Out Grassroots Philanthropy? Empirical Evidence from an Education Crowdfunding Platform (original) (raw)

Donor Retention in Online Crowdfunding Communities

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '15, 2015

Online crowdfunding platforms like DonorsChoose.org and Kickstarter allow specific projects to get funded by targeted contributions from a large number of people. Critical for the success of crowdfunding communities is recruitment and continued engagement of donors. With donor attrition rates above 70%, a significant challenge for online crowdfunding platforms as well as traditional offline non-profit organizations is the problem of donor retention.

The Rich Get Richer? Limited Learning in Charitable Giving on donorschoose.org

2017

Crowdfunding websites allow anyone to raise money through many financial contributions from the ‘crowd.’ One commonly cited social benefit of crowdfunding is the democratization of access to capital. The degree of the democratization depends on how much ordinary people, who may not have financial access before crowdfunding, receive funding. Since many crowdfunders start out as a non-professional, learning is a critical factor for them to be successful. However, it is not clear that initially unsuccessful crowdfunders learn enough to prevent the rich get richer phenomenon. By analyzing a large dataset from donorschoose.org, we found that successful crowdfunders appear to learn more while unsuccessful crowdfunders frequently give up on crowdfunding. This result calls for design solutions that help crowdfunders learn from failure better.

Improving Donation Distribution for Crowdfunding: An Agent-Based Model

Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling, 2016

Donation-based crowdfunding has the potential to democratize capital raising by soliciting donations directly from the public through the Web and social media. These crowdfunding platforms, however, often function as unregulated open markets, in which there is minimal intervention to influence donation distribution across projects. In fact, research on crowdfunding hints that donation distribution in most crowdfunding platforms are suboptimal: while the overall success rates of crowdfunding projects are often low, a significant proportion of projects receive donations way over their targets. In this paper, we propose a new donation distributing system that aim to (a) distribute donations more effectively among the projects, and (b) align the allocation of donations with the preferences of donors. An agent-based model was developed to test the proposed system. Results showed that the proposed system not only increased the overall success rates of projects, but also led to more successes for projects preferred by donors. Implications to future crowdfunding platforms are discussed.

Accepted by..- Director of Graduate Studies, Comparative Media Studies

2016

Crowdfunding, the raising of capital from a large and diverse pool of donors via online platforms, has grown exponentially in the past five years, spurred by the rise of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. While legislative attention in the US has turned to the potential to use crowdfunding as a means of raising capital for companies, less attention has been paid to the use of crowdfunding for civic projectsprojects involving either directly or indirectly, the use of government funds, assets or sponsorship, which may include the development of public assets. This project analyzes the subgenre of civic crowdfunding from three perspectives. First, it provides a comprehensive quantitative overview of the subgenre of civic crowdfunding, its most common project types and its geographic distribution. Second, it describes three edge cases, projects that, while uncommon, demonstrate the current limits, aspirations and potential future path of the subgenre. Third, it analyzes the historical and intellectual paradigms within which civic crowdfunding projects and platforms are operating: whether they are best located within the historical context of community fundraising, participatory planning, entrepreneurial culture or a combination of the three. In addressing these questions, the thesis will explore the potential benefits and challenges of using crowdfunding as a means of executing community-oriented projects in the built environment, and offer proposals for how public and non-profit institutions can engage with crowdfunding to realize civic outcomes.

Complementarity and interconnection between CSR and crowdfunding: A case study in Greece

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and crowdfunding are two concepts that have been affected through digitalization. Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative form of financing that collects funds from the 'crowd' and channel them into various social causes or business projects. It provides opportunities that can potentially radically change the traditional landscape of CSR. Companies can use crowdfunding when designing and implement their CSR strategies through various ways, like increasing available funding, raising awareness and engagement, building communication channels with stakeholder and increasing marketing. This paper explores and discusses the emerging linkages, interconnections and complementarities between crowdfunding and CSR. It also highlights the importance of crowdfunding for the banking sector and presents the act4Greece donation/reward-based crowdfunding program, developed by a commercial banking institution in Greece, as a pioneering case study that incorporates crowdfunding in the bank's CSR strategy.

Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

Crowdfunding, the raising of capital from a large and diverse pool of donors via online platforms, has grown exponentially in the past five years, spurred by the rise of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. While legislative attention in the US has turned to the potential to use crowdfunding as a means of raising capital for companies, less attention has been paid to the use of crowdfunding for civic projectsprojects involving either directly or indirectly, the use of government funds, assets or sponsorship, which may include the development of public assets. This project analyzes the subgenre of civic crowdfunding from three perspectives. First, it provides a comprehensive quantitative overview of the subgenre of civic crowdfunding, its most common project types and its geographic distribution. Second, it describes three edge cases, projects that, while uncommon, demonstrate the current limits, aspirations and potential future path of the subgenre. Third, it analyzes the historical and intellectual paradigms within which civic crowdfunding projects and platforms are operating: whether they are best located within the historical context of community fundraising, participatory planning, entrepreneurial culture or a combination of the three. In addressing these questions, the thesis will explore the potential benefits and challenges of using crowdfunding as a means of executing community-oriented projects in the built environment, and offer proposals for how public and non-profit institutions can engage with crowdfunding to realize civic outcomes.

Assessing Stability in the Relationship Between Parties in Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing Projects During the COVID-19 Crisis

Journal of Global Information Management, 2022

This research is devoted to the study of ways to solve problems that arise in extreme conditions in the implementation of crowdfunding or crowdsourcing projects. The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as a vivid example of such problems. The article considers the elimination of distrust and concerns of the participants of crowdsourcing projects and the formation of sustainable trust against the background of uncertainty and stress among donors. Various factors affect the sustainability of donor decisions to varying degrees; the unifying trend that increases donor involvement is the reducing of monotony. Further improvement of donor relations and sustainable project performance focuses on the use of a specialized donor classification system. The necessity of creating a portrait of a typical donor was revealed, the use of which will allow eliminating conflicts as a result of differences in culture. Achieving sustainability of projects requires identifying funding thresholds, methods for receiving payments in excess of this threshold, consistent communication with donors during the campaign, regular disbursements of funds, and stable publication of donation reports. To implement these actions, an analysis of activity in social networks and other social interactions is required.

Mapping the Field of Donation-Based Crowdfunding for Charitable Causes: Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2020

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