What determines the success and failure of environmental crowdfunding?

Abstract

Online crowdfunding can help address the perennial financial shortfalls in environmental conservation and management. Although many online crowdfunding campaigns fail to collect any funds due to not achieving their targets, little is known about what drives success. To address this knowledge gap, we applied a mixed-methods approach to data from 473 successful and failed campaigns hosted on the online crowdfunding platform Readyfor. We found that fundraising performance varied by topic, with campaigns on pet animal management outperforming those focussed on landscape management and sustainable use. We also found that marketing strategies associated with online findability and increased reach through social networks, increased fundraising success. However, the existence of other environmental campaigns running simultaneously, reduced the chance of success, which implies that the selecting popular topics does not always increase the likelihood of success due to increased competition. Wider applications of marketing could enhance the ability of environmental crowdfunding campaigns to raise funds.

Evidence for effective conservation fundraising: Comparing social media with traditional mailshot field experiments

“…Our results reinforce the importance of using marketing insight to guide fundraising efforts and the need for specialist skills within conservation beyond natural science (Kubo et al, 2021;Veríssimo et al, 2017). Findings that publicly announcing seed money encouraged people to donate for fundraising campaigns are consistent with prior literature not only in natural resource management but also in marketing and economics (Gneezy et al, 2014;Kubo et al, 2018).…”

“…Yet, despite the global reach of online fundraising campaigns for conservation, there has been little empirical evidence around what determines fundraising success. One exception is Kubo et al (2021) which found that project topics and marketing strategies associated with online findability affected fundraising success. However, this research focused on observational data, which limits the ability to draw causal insights into the drivers of success.…”

“…We call on practitioners and organizations to share their experiences, both positive and negative, in fundraising for biodiversity conservation. That will enable practitioners and decision makers to evaluate cost effectiveness of different strategies of conservation fundraising, a practice in line with the thinking in other areas of conservation (Catalano et al, 2019;Game et al, 2014;Kubo et al, 2021;Pienkowski et al, 2021). While there is likely substantial research in this space, most is kept internal with organizations often avoiding discussions around how much they fundraise and how effective they are.…”

Technology Project Summaries as a Predictor of Crowdfunding Success

“…Borst et al ( 2018) argued that, for example, the online nature of crowdfunding may amplify a "bystander effect", which suggests that potential funders may withhold funding because they assume that others will provide funding. While research to understand and predict crowdfunding success has accelerated in recent years (for example, Majumdar & Bose, 2018;Song et al, 2019;Felipe et al, 2022), it has often focused on highly specific industrial domains, such as green energy (Hörisch, 2015;Kubo et al, 2021), restaurants (Lelo de Larrea et al, 2019), medical solutions (Ba et al, 2021), video games (Song et al, 2019), or space exploration (Pomeroy et al, 2019). Alternatively, research has also addressed multiple domains and numerous variables at once (for example, Parhankangas & Rernko, 2017;Zhou et al, 2018;Song et al, 2019;Ryoba et al, 2021).…”

“…More accurate prediction models may be provided by widening up a large number of variables into the research investigations, such as including project and funding level (Liang et al, 2019), the entrepreneur's gender (Johnson et al, 2018;Geiger & Moore, 2022), education (Allison et al, 2017), number of social network ties (Lukkarinen et al, 2016;Borst et al, 2018;Hoegen et al, 2018), number of comments and blog entries, and presence of a video appeal (see Kraus et al, 2016;Wang et al 2018;Geiger & Moore, 2022;Kubo et al, 2021;Ryoba et al, 2021). However, applying such complex models into practice can be difficult.…”