Civic crowdfunding: A new opportunity for local governments

Abstract

In civic crowdfunding, local communities are asked to financially contribute to projects aimed at the regeneration of an area. Usually a local government acts as a co-funder. This paper employs a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to discover which conditions are combined and may result in the collection of a significant amount of funds. Five conditions were selected: the nature of project, the number of backers, the number of rewards, the percentage of backers that did not require a reward and the percentage of rewards not required during the fundraising campaign. The study used a sample of 40 Italian successful civic crowdfunding rounds sponsored and match-funded by a local government. The nature of the projects and the presence of rewards seem to emerge as critical influencing factors. These findings open up further investigations on the attitudes of civic backers towards rewards and on the charitable nature of civic fundraising.