Funding Goal Research Articles

What convinces donors? An analysis of donation‐based crowdfunding projects from nonprofit charities: The case of South Korea

AbstractDespite the potential usefulness of donation‐based crowdfunding as a fundraising tool for nonprofit social welfare organizations, academic understanding of what leads to a successful campaign is limited. Drawing on an information processing model, this research analyzes 889 donation‐based crowdfunding campaigns undertaken by nonprofit social welfare organizations using HappyBean, the most representative crowdfunding platform in South Korea. This study examines whether different types of project information influence the percentage of individual donors giving to the campaign's funding goal. Results show that the emotional impression of a campaign title, visual information, message quality, and message contents are significantly related to the extent of crowdfunding success. This study provides recommendations for nonprofit social welfare organizations to improve the way in which they operate crowdfunding campaigns and communicate with potential funders.

Financial return of crowdfunding platforms: are funding trends and success rates changing in the Covid-19 era?

The online crowdfunding platforms become the main way of nonprofits to raise funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, due to lockdown and social and physical distancing policies. One year after the beginning of the current global health pandemic, this study applies quantitative methods for providing results on the evolution of the amounts donated for nonprofits’ projects through an online crowdfunding platform, comparing the success rates of the campaigns during COVID-19 pandemic with financial results in previous years. Moreover, this study focusses on the determinants of financial return of the campaigns, investigating the amount of funding goals and the text features used for describing the crowdfunding campaign. The findings open up further investigations on the financial strategy applied by nonprofits during crises.

“Putting Suppliers on the Map:” Centering Upstream Voices in Water Funds Outreach

AbstractAs water funds and other watershed investment programs expand around the world, there is growing interest in designing equitable programs that provide both upstream and downstream benefits. While research demonstrates that diverse values underlie upstream participation, existing communication and outreach materials from non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, development banks, and others tend to highlight the goals of downstream actors (e.g., improving water supply for cities), with little attention to upstream perspectives. We present a case study in response to this gap, where we collaborated with a water fund and a river users association in Colombia to co‐produce a website entitled “Putting Suppliers on the Map” in which interviews and photography illuminate the perspectives of upstream participants and the intermediary organization. The website offers multiple lessons for communication and environmental education in water funds by shifting focus to the motivations of upstream participants, including trust‐building among upstream and downstream participants via intermediary actors, and informing downstream water users of the essential role of these processes for program success. Analyzing the website testimonials, we show that the vast majority of participants were motivated not only by overlapping instrumental and relational values associated with conservation, but also by a variety of personal and community goals. We found that the largest barrier to participation over time was the need to build trust between the water fund and rural communities and to align water fund goals with participants' motivations. By making visible the motivations and challenges of upstream actors, the website reverses the standard direction of environmental education (in which high‐level actors or downstream groups educate upstream residents). In‐so‐doing, the website aims to help downstream actors envision more productive and equitable ways of interacting with upstream participants.

Mbarara University Research Training Initiative: Experiences and Accomplishments of the MEPI Junior D43 TW010128 Award in Uganda.

ObjectiveIn 2015, Mbarara University of Science and Technology was awarded the Mbarara University Research Training Initiative (MURTI) under grant number D43 TW010128 to build capacity of junior faculty to become the next generation of researchers in Africa. In this paper, we document the experiences and achievements of the research capacity building efforts at MUST.MethodsWe conducted a descriptive evaluation study which involved document review and in-depth interviews. We used “Reach” and ‘Effectiveness’ from the RE-AIM framework to guide the document review, and the organizational theory of implementation effectiveness to guide the in-depth interviews.ResultsIn the MURTI program, we conducted 17 short courses between August 2015 and July 2021, a total of 6597 attendances were recorded. The most attended courses were responsible conduct of research (n = 826), qualitative research methods (n = 744), and data management (n = 613). Thirty-three fellows were recruited and funded to conduct mentored research leading to 48 publications and 14 extramural grant applications were yielded. From the in-depth interviews, the participants appreciated the research training program, the enhanced research skills attained, and the institutional capacity built. They attributed the success of the program to the training approach of using short courses, readiness of the junior faculty to change, and the supportive environment by the mentors and trainers in the program.ConclusionThe D43 TW010128 research training grant-built capacity for the junior faculty at MUST, enhanced their research skills, promoted research capacity institutionally and provided career development for the junior faculty. This was possible due to the positive attitude of the junior faculty (organizational readiness) to change and the supportive environment (mentors and trainers) during implementation of the grant. These two factors provided a favorable institutional climate that guaranteed success of the funding goals.

The Known Unknowns: What Citizen Science Projects in Germany Know about Their Volunteers—And What They Don’t Know

The citizen science landscape in Germany offers an enormous range for participation. More than 170 projects currently present themselves on the national citizen science platform. In 2020, we conducted a survey among 140 projects (participation rate 56%), and they provided information on the organisational framework and characteristics (disciplines, initiators, funding, and project goals), as well as on the academic researchers and the volunteering citizen scientists involved. A surprising result was that the level of knowledge about the volunteers is very low overall. Many projects deliberately do not collect personal data (e.g., on socio-demographic variables, knowledge, and behaviour), partly for data-protection reasons and partly because they are unsure about how to collect it due to a lack of instruments and standards. We aim to illustrate the complexity of this issue and discuss various dilemmas arising between theoretical aspirations and the pragmatic and procedural realities in practice. We conclude with suggestions for developing project-specific strategies to increase diversity and inclusion. We argue that the task of conducting accompanying research on participant diversity cannot be borne by individual projects alone and consider the development and implementation of co-creative and qualitative approaches suitable for this purpose.

Characteristics of Online Crowdfunding Campaigns for Urological Cancers in the United States.

We examined the characteristics and financial outcomes of online crowdfunding campaigns for patients with major urological cancers in the U.S. This cross-sectional study analyzed publicly available data from GoFundMe, the largest online medical crowdfunding service, via automated web scraping. Online campaigns from 2010 to 2018 with the following primary cancer types were included: kidney, prostate, bladder and testicular. Financial outcomes were compared using Kruskal-Wallis and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. Multivariable analyses were utilized to identify predictors of campaign financial outcomes. Kidney cancers were the most frequent online campaign type (478), followed by prostate (379), bladder (202) and testicular (175) malignancies. Urological cancer campaign recipients frequently requested funding for medical expenses (71%) during active treatment (57%). After adjustment, testicular cancer and children's cancer campaigns generated more donations than other urological and adult cancer campaigns (p <0.05). Family and friend-authored campaigns generated more donations and average donation amounts than self-authored campaigns (p <0.05). Campaign narratives focused on disheartening circumstances received fewer donations than narratives focused on the recipient's high moral character or contributions to society (p <0.05), and unclear narratives received the smallest donation amounts (p <0.05). Urological cancer crowdfunding in the U.S. is primarily used to finance uncovered costs associated with medical care during active treatment. Crowdfunding financial outcomes are likely related to the campaign recipient's age, malignancy type, social network and primary appeal of the narrative. Urologists should be aware of trends in medical crowdfunding in order to better understand the financial burden this patient population faces.

Machine Learning for Creativity: Using Similarity Networks to Design Better Crowdfunding Projects

A fundamental tension exists in creativity between novelty and similarity. This research exploits this tension to help creators craft successful projects in crowdfunding. To do so, the authors apply the concept of combinatorial creativity, analyzing each new project in connection to prior similar projects. By using machine learning techniques (Word2vec and Word Mover’s Distance), they measure the degrees of similarity between crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter. They analyze how this similarity pattern relates to a project’s funding performance and find that (1) the prior level of success of similar projects strongly predicts a new project’s funding performance, (2) the funding performance increases with a balance between being novel and imitative, (3) the optimal funding goal is close to the funds raised by prior similar projects, and (4) the funding performance increases with a balance between atypical and conventional imitation. The authors use these findings to generate actionable recommendations for project creators and crowdfunding platforms.

Red flags and rave reviews: Explaining too-good-to-be-true crowdfunding campaigns

Crowdfunding platforms enable entrepreneurs to bring to life ideas that may otherwise have remained unrealized. When crowdfunding campaigns go well, campaigners are able to fulfill their vision, funders’ engagement is rewarded, and society gains access to a range of new offerings. But some recent high-profile medical-technology campaigns have failed to deliver their promised rewards despite reaching and at times far exceeding their funding goals. The objectives of this article are to shed light on why donors fund campaigns that turn out to be too good to be true and to examine how this engagement reduces trust in crowdfunding. To this end, I explore the role of product creativity as a dual mechanism for both funding success and postfunding delivery failure. Product creativity is typically associated with positive crowdfunding outcomes. But in the context of medical-technology campaigns, product creativity may make community members more attracted to campaigns that are less likely to deliver on their campaign promises. This phenomenon then increases the likelihood that the campaign will reduce trust in crowdfunding, hurting donors, the focal venture, and future campaigners. I offer practical implications for crowdfunding platforms, campaigners, and supporters interested in learning more about the pitfalls associated with initially successful crowdfunding campaigns.

Project Recommendation Using Heterogeneous Traits in Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has gained widespread popularity in recent years. By funding entrepreneurs with creative minds, it is gradually taking over the role of venture capitalists who provide the much needed seed capital to jump start business ventures. Despite the huge success of the crowdfunding platforms, not every project is successful in reaching its funding goal. Therefore, in this paper, we intend to answer the following question "what set of features determine a project's success?". We begin by studying the dynamics of Kickstarter, a popular reward-based crowdfunding platform, and the impact of social networks on this platform. Contrary to previous studies, our analysis is not restricted to project-based features alone; instead, we expand the features into four different categories: temporal traits, personal traits, geo-location traits, and network traits. Using a comprehensive dataset of 18K projects and 116K tweets, we provide several unique insights about these features and their effects on the success of Kickstarter projects. Based on these insights, we build a supervised learning framework to learn a model that can recommend a set of investors to Kickstarter projects. By utilizing features from the first three days of project duration alone, we show that our results are significantly better than the previous studies.

All failures are not equal: Degree of failure and the launch of subsequent crowdfunding campaigns

Despite the growing importance of crowdfunding as an alternative source of entrepreneurial finance and in driving innovation, we still have limited understanding of how failure impacts the entrepreneur's subsequent actions and decisions. In this study, we examine how the degree of failure in a crowdfunding campaign affects the entrepreneur's tendency and urgency to launch a subsequent crowdfunding campaign. Using a sample of 63337 entrepreneurs who failed in their initial crowdfunding campaigns and drawing on the near-miss effect, we test a series of hypotheses. Our results suggest that not only does marginal failures increase the likelihood that an entrepreneur will launch a subsequent crowdfunding campaign, it also increases the urgency in which the entrepreneur launches the subsequent crowdfunding campaign. The results reveal that the funding goal size is a moderating factor to the relationship between degree of failure and the launch of a subsequent crowdfunding campaign However, contrary to our expectation, it is such that entrepreneurs whose funding goal size are relatively large are more likely to launch subsequent crowdfunding campaigns.

Demand and supply sides of the crowdfunding ecosystem: The case of Kickstarter campaigns and potential Hungarian investors

AbstractCrowdfunding is a disruptive innovation and has provoked interest as a new way of raising finance. The objective of our research was to analyse both the demand and supply sides of the crowdfunding ecosystem. The study used two methods. The first was a database analysis of 259,114 Kickstarter campaigns. The second was a survey on public awareness of crowdfunding in Hungary, from the perspective of 132 potential investors. The findings suggest several success factors that may be useful for campaign launchers: (1) appealing project presentation; (2) diverse pool of rewards; (3) realistic set of funding goals; (4) appropriate categories and sums of pledges; and (5) frequent communication and satisfactory information about the campaign. Furthermore, the study revealed the differences between the potential investors' expectations and the reality of crowdfunding practices.

What Contributes to a Crowdfunding Campaign's Success? Evidence and Analyses from GoFundMe Data

Researchers have attempted to measure the success of crowdfunding campaigns using a variety of determinants, such as the descriptions of the crowdfunding campaigns, the amount of funding goals, and crowdfunding project characteristics. Although many successful determinants have been reported in the literature, it remains unclear whether the cover photo and the text in the title and description could be combined in a fusion classifier to better predict the crowdfunding campaign's success. In this work, we focus on the performance of the crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe across a wide variety of funding categories. We analyze the attributes available at the launch of the campaign and identify attributes that are important for each category of the campaigns. Furthermore, we develop a fusion classifier based on the random forest that significantly improves the prediction result, thus suggesting effective ways to make a campaign successful.

Talk is cheap?! The value of a ban on product simulations and renderings on a crowdfunding platform

ABSTRACT We exploit the 20 September 2012 intervention on Kickstarter where projects in the Hardware and Project Design categories, but not in other categories, were prohibited from presenting simulations and renderings in their crowdfunding campaigns. Using a partition-type analysis estimate for 110,258 projects, we find that the intervention lowered the odds of meeting the funding goal (extensive margin); however, it did not significantly increase the amount of funding received above the goal amount (intensive margin). The findings are robust to pre-trends tests. Post-intervention, based on the exploration-exploitation framework, projects in the treated categories used more exploitative (vs. explorative) language. Furthermore, projects in the treated category benefited from using narcissistic and entrepreneurial orientation rhetoric before the intervention; however, this did not hold after the intervention. Finally, projects from the control categories did not increase deceptive language after the intervention and experienced lower odds of meeting funding goals after the intervention when using ambiguous language. The findings highlight the role of centralized intervention in improving signals on noisy crowdfunding platforms and the declining role of rhetoric for both treated and control categories.

An Empirical Study of the Dynamic and Differential Effects of Prefunding

This study investigates the dynamic and differential effects of prefunding on reward‐based crowdfunding markets plagued by information asymmetry. Prefunding, an innovative feature in crowdfunding, enables founders to share project information with potential backers before fundraising begins. By collecting and analyzing daily project‐level panel data from one of the world's largest crowdfunding platforms, we found that projects with the prefunding feature were more likely to succeed in reaching their funding goals and the effects of prefunding on the amount of funds raised remained positive and significant over time. In probing why this occurred, we used text analyses and revealed that the mechanisms driving the funding premium were the specific types of prefunding information shared between founders and potential backers (volume, length, and sentiment). Furthermore, in examining the sources of funds, we found that prefunding information first attracts funding from regular backers, followed by lottery backers. This herding behavior creates two intertwined funding streams—a primary and a secondary—for prefunding projects. Finally, using counterfactual decomposition analysis, we identified the types of projects that benefited the most from prefunding and found that prefunding democratizes funding outcomes. These findings and insights into information sharing, herding, and differential effects of prefunding contribute to the OM‐IS research on operational designs of reward‐based crowdfunding platforms that serve early‐stage ventures in online environments with minimal informational oversight and regulations.

Matching Returning Donors to Projects on Philanthropic Crowdfunding Platforms

We propose an approach to match returning donors to fundraising campaigns on philanthropic crowdfunding platforms. It is based on a structural econometric model of utility-maximizing donors who can derive both altruistic (from the welfare of others) and egoistic (from personal motivations) utilities from donating—a unique feature of philanthropic giving. We estimate our model using a comprehensive data set from DonorsChoose.org—the largest crowdfunding platform for K–12 education. We find that the proposed model more accurately identifies the projects that donors would like to donate to on their return in a future period, and how much they would donate, than popular personalized recommendation approaches in the literature. From the estimated model, we find that primarily egoistic factors motivate over two-thirds of the donations, but, over the course of the fundraising campaign, both motivations play a symbiotic role: egoistic motivations drive the funding in the early stages of a campaign when the viability of the project is still unclear, whereas altruistic motivations help reach the funding goal in the later stages. Finally, we design a recommendation policy using the proposed model to maximize the total funding each week considering the needs of all projects and the heterogeneous budgets and preferences of donors. We estimate that over the last 14 weeks of the data period, such a policy would have raised 2.5% more donation, provided 9% more funding to the projects by allocating them to more viable projects, funded 17% more projects, and provided 15% more utility to the donors from the donations than the current system. Counterintuitively, we find that the policy that maximizes total funding each week leads to higher utility for the donors over time than a policy that maximizes donors’ total utility each week. The reason is that the funding-maximizing policy focuses donations on more viable projects, leading to more funded projects, and, ultimately, higher realized donors’ utility. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems.

Re-Examining Crowdfunding Success: How the Crowdfunding Goal Moderates the Relationship of Success Factors and Crowdfunding Performance

The factors determining the success of crowdfunding projects is one of the central issues for crowdfunding researchers. Quantitative approaches recognise the number of funds targeted as an important control variable. However, little is known about the impact of the funding goal on other factors that impact crowdfunding success. We hypothesise that the effect of crowdfunding success factors varies contingent on the funding goal level. A dataset of 338 crowdfunding projects from the largest German crowdfunding platform StartNext in the years 2015 to 2016 is analysed by conducting regression analyses controlling for varying funding goal sizes. We use the dependent variables success, the degree of success and the number of project supporters and control whether the effect of independent variables such as comments, updates and social media depend on different funding goals. Our study indicates that the impact of the investigated success factors, in fact, strongly depends on the funding goal levels of crowdfunding projects. By grouping projects into clusters of varying funding goals, we find that the impact of individual success factors changes and that the funding goal plays a moderating role for factors impacting project success.Implications for Central European audience: Many crowdfunding studies focus on the most popular US-based platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. We examined projects on the largest German reward-based crowdfunding platform StartNext. These results help both researchers and future entrepreneurs in Europe to better understand supporter behaviour. We suggest that future entrepreneurs should be aware that factors influencing the success of a crowdfunding project strongly depend on the set funding goal, which should be adequately considered in future crowdfunding research.

An Exploratory Study into Rewards-Based Crowdfunding

We use a dataset of over 200,000 projects, with a total funding of more than $1.2 billion, to investigate the main factors affecting the success rate of projects launched on the rewards-based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Our findings suggest that project creators that set a lower target goal size, time their fundraising campaign to avoid a high degree of inner-platform competition, and avoid initiating their funding campaign on holidays or on days leading into a weekend have a higher chance of successfully funding their projects. On average, successfully funded projects often surpass their target goal by small margins. We find that setting a longer duration for the funding campaign does not increase the probability that a project will be successfully funded. As opposed to the belief that crowdfunding serves solely as a signaling device for venture capitalists (VCs), we find that the vast majority of successfully funded projects launched in Kickstarter do not receive funding from VCs. By constructing a web-scraper and collecting real-time data, we observe that the funding rate over the course of successfully funded campaigns takes a U-shape. Using the real-time data collected, we examine crowdfunding webpage setup and find that the probability that a project exceeds its funding goal is positively correlated with the amount of images, videos, and text description.

Supporting Students: OER and Textbook Affordability Initiatives at a Mid-Sized University

ABSTRACT In 2018, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) kicked off a statewide program to increase awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) at colleges and universities. Spurred by the efforts of ACHE, the University of North Alabama committed to OER and textbook affordability programs and included OER adoption as a key aspiration in their 2019–2024 strategic plan, Roaring with Excellence. With support from the president and provost of the university, Collier Library adopted strategic purchasing initiatives, including database purchases to support specific courses as well as purchasing reserve copies of textbooks for high-enrollment, required classes. In addition, the scholarly communications librarian became a founding member of the OER working group on campus. This group’s mission is to direct efforts for increasing faculty awareness and adoption of OER. This presentation will discuss the structure of each of these programs from initial idea to implementation. Included will be discussions of assessment of faculty and student awareness, development of an OER stipend program, starting a textbook purchasing program, promotion of efforts, funding, and future goals.

Follow a System for Setting Annual Fund Goals

Successful FundraisingVolume 29, Issue 2 p. 7-7 Goal-Setting Procedures Follow a System for Setting Annual Fund Goals First published: 07 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/sfr.31669Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume29, Issue2February 2021Pages 7-7 RelatedInformation

Quality and Pricing Decisions for Reward-based Crowdfunding: Effects of Moral Hazard

Private cost information and entrepreneurial moral hazard are serious problems that result from the significant information asymmetry associated with creators and their backers in reward-based crowdfunding. We establish a dynamic game-theoretic model to investigate the effect of moral hazard on the quality and price decisions of a creator (male) when his cost efficiency is unobservable. Backers (female) in the crowdfunding stage directly observe neither the cost efficiency nor the product quality of the creator. They then make pledge decisions based on expectations about the quality after observing the campaign parameter signals (i.e., the reward price and funding goal) and whether the regulation mechanism is implemented with a strong hand (tighter regulations mean that the creators have less moral hazard). We find that compared with the information symmetry case, when the efficiency of creators is not known to backers, an efficient creator always provides a higher level of product quality when moral hazard is present but not always when moral hazard is absent. In addition, we investigate the effect of moral hazard on the creator and consumer surplus when the creator's cost efficiency is unobservable. Interestingly, we show that moral hazard may benefit both the creator and consumers. This explains the puzzling measures of some reward crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which take no active role in managing or monitoring the entrepreneurial projects. Finally, we find that reasonably the efficient creator can better signal his efficiency by using two signaling devices, i.e., the reward price and funding goal; in this case, interestingly, the existence of moral hazard may still benefit both the creators and consumers. This confirms the robustness of our main results.