The contribution of crowdfunding for philanthropy: A systematic review and framework of donation and reward crowdfunding

Abstract

Which novelties do donation-and reward-based crowdfunding bring to philanthropy? Scholars interested in crowdfunding contributed to developing empirical explanations on which features impact online giving. However, the focus on theory building is limited. We developed a theoretical framework by categorizing the empirical findings reported in 198 studies, which resulted in four crowdfunding features impacting giving: (1) project creator, (2) social information,(3) rewards, and (4) project description. We explain why these features impact giving by integrating them with insights from several fields of social sciences, deriving ten giving mechanisms. We conclude that with impacting donations via crowdfunding, three giving themes exist: being affected by (1) the perceived project's quality, (2) social connections and/or (3) tangible rewards. The categorization of mechanisms for giving allows initiators to extract best practice examples for increasing the probability of successful crowdfunding projects considering the giving mechanisms.

Understanding the effects of socialness and color complexity in listing images on crowdfunding behavior

“…The overwhelmingly prevalent dependent variable employed in previous empirical studies is successful funding of projects, whilst the dominant analytical methods are linear and logistic regression (Deng et al, 2022). Numerous recent studies have taken a more holistic view of the corpus of previous research into crowdfunding success factors, including via IMDS 124,3 meta-analysis (Geiger and Moore, 2022;Li et al, 2022) and literature reviews (Deng et al, 2022;van Tuenenbroek et al, 2023;J aki et al, 2022;Shneor and Vik, 2020). Success factors are many and varied but can generally be broken down into those related to characteristics of the concept, project and project campaign, factors focusing on the creator/initiator/fundraiser, project listing-related factors (including soft and hard information such as metrics, text, images, and videos), factors related to backers/supporters/donors/investors/funders, and factors related to the platform/network.…”

“…The overwhelmingly prevalent dependent variable employed in previous empirical studies is successful funding of projects, whilst the dominant analytical methods are linear and logistic regression (Deng et al ., 2022). Numerous recent studies have taken a more holistic view of the corpus of previous research into crowdfunding success factors, including via meta-analysis (Geiger and Moore, 2022; Li et al ., 2022) and literature reviews (Deng et al ., 2022; van Tuenenbroek et al ., 2023; Jáki et al. , 2022; Shneor and Vik, 2020).…”

Donor inspiration in nonprofit management: Conceptualization and measurement in a peer‐to‐peer context

“…Second, we show that the collaboration of nonprofit and business organizations offers a suitable environment to foster the participation of peer fundraisers and trigger peer donor's donation behavior. Since our framework is context specific, research in other contexts, such as crowdfunding (van Teunenbroek et al, 2023), is required to provide an understanding of peer‐to‐peer interactions in more depth.…”

Four lessons learned: Employees' perceptions of fundraising via reward‐based crowdfunding

“…Research on philanthropic crowdfunding is scarce (Alegre & Moleskis, 2021;Kim et al, 2022;Van Teunenbroek et al, 2023).…”

“…Research on philanthropic crowdfunding is scarce (Alegre & Moleskis, 2021; Kim et al, 2022; Van Teunenbroek et al, 2023). Moreover, employees' perceptions of crowdfunding are overlooked, as earlier studies focus on funding by private individuals or donors (Van Teunenbroek & Hasanefendic, 2022).…”