Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing Initiatives in Detroit

This study examines the role of crowdfunding and community-based initiatives in Detroit, a city that has been hurt by economic distress for several years. We start by compiling the Kickstarter projects initiated and successfully funded all over the US during April 2009-July 2012, and later focus on those occurring in Detroit only. We conduct in-depth analyses to understand the intra-urban characteristics that provide opportunities for such initiatives. By combining the census demographic data with qualitative information collected from online surveys and semi-structured interviews, we analyze the specific roles of crowdfunding initiatives in creating sustainable urban communities. This analysis finds that Kickstarter projects initiated primarily in low-income neighborhoods, and the main motivation had been the autonomy for the Kickstarter initiators who create projects on their own terms and conditions that benefits the local communities. This study is one of the first to examine crowdfunding initiatives. In an age of continuing economic downturn, grantfunding and government budgets for community projects are the first ones to be eliminated. This study suggests that the projects initiated in Detroit’s neighborhoods fill up the grantfunding gaps, thus marking crowdfunding as a contemporary way for creating sustainable processes

What kind of cause unites a crowd? Understanding crowdfunding as collective action

This paper explores the types of shared goals that underlie fundraising activities in web-enabled charitable crowdfunding, as well as how these goals unite donors and fundseekers. A grounded theory analysis is undertaken using a stratified sample of records from Pledgie.com, a crowdfunding website dedicated to charitable causes. Content analysis of these records reveals three types of information sharing associated with successful fundraising (1) information supporting impact (2) information supporting morality and (3) information supporting external relationships. These information types are related back to existing literature on collective action to explain how and why communities of donors form around specific fundraising initiatives. Findings suggest that while most existing models of charitable crowdfunding adopt a view of information sharing based on dyadic communication between donors and fundseekers, charitable crowdfunding should also be viewed as a technological paradigm capable of forming action-oriented collectives based around specific causes, beliefs, and/or identities

Place and Crowdfunding: An Examination of Two Distressed Cities

Crowdfunding is a relatively new form of funding made possible by Web 2.0. This study examines community-based projects made possible through the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. Projects were compiled that were successfully funded between the dates of April 28, 2009 and July 26, 2012. These projects were collected for all cities listed on the site in the United States. Subsequently they were compared across three measures: raw numbers of projects, normalized city population, and against the creative class index of Richard Florida. Using these measures, Detroit and New Orleans emerged as cities for further in depth analysis. Interviews with initiators in these two cities were used to determine motivations that initiators had for beginning these projects in these cities. Further examination was made by overlaying locations of Kickstarter projects with demographic data from the US census. Projects were found to be occurring in lower income neighborhoods, filling voids in grantfunding and providing autonomy for Kickstarter initiators to create projects on their own terms in their communities. The types of projects occurring in neighborhoods may also be offering indications of need and of burgeoning industries in the two cities. Many studies taut the value of community involvement for the well-being of individuals, but this is one of the first to examine how people use crowdfunding to engage in their communities and how these projects are geographically distributed. In an economic downturn, grantfunding and government budgets for community projects are often cut. Crowdfunded projects can often direct opportunities for individuals to execute ideas and can be a proxy for cash strapped cities to allocate funding more efficiently

AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ANTECEDENTS OF CONTRIBUTION PATTERNS IN CROWDFUNDED MARKETS

Crowd-funding markets have recently emerged as a new source of capital supporting entrepreneurial ideas and ventures. In these markets, any individual is capable of proposing an idea, and interested others can then contribute funds in support of it. Given the recency of crowd-funding’s emergence, participants ’ behavior in these markets is not yet well understood. From a social influence standpoint, these markets are unique because the timing and amount of others ’ prior contribution decisions are publicly observable. This observable information about prior contributions is therefore likely to have an influence on later contribution decisions. We empirically examine this notion in a crowd-funded market for online journalism. Bearing in mind that prior literature has identified online journalism as a form of public good, we find that funders in this marketplace treat one another’s contributions as substitutable, a behavior that may be indicative of free riding. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed