Successful Features of Crowdfunding Campaigns: An Analysis of Requests for Coronavirus Food Relief

Crowdfunding is an emerging industry in the past decades, which proliferates and has attracted an enormous population from the public to be involved in various funding projects in multiple fields such as business entrepreneurship, healthcare, and fintech. Meanwhile, charitable crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter have allowed internet users to provide help and donation to the fundraisers directly. As the year 2020 is surrounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic spreading out the world, the topic of coronavirus relief has surged. Thus, it is worthy of evaluating the crowdfunding campaign\u27s effectiveness during the coronavirus context by making a connection between fundraising activities and coronavirus relief. This paper aims to investigate the effects of various factors affecting a donation-based crowdfunding campaign for coronavirus relief of food donation in the United States and determine the significant factors affecting the campaign\u27s success rate. To achieve this research purpose, secondary data were extensively collected from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe for regression analysis. The sample data was derived from crowdfunding campaigns launched from March 1st, 2020, to May 31st, 2020. During this period, the United States was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with an exponentially surged number of confirmed cases. This paper derives the independent variables that have been examined from previous studies and further applies in the coronavirus context to identify whether these factors are significant influencers to the success of crowdfunding campaigns for coronavirus relief of food donation. The factors being examined include target funding amount, the existence of spelling mistakes, the presence of pictures, video, social network sites, project updates, comments between fundraisers and backers, and links to external websites. That the significant factors contributing to a successful funding project are similar, as identified in previous reward-based and equity crowdfunding studies. On the other hand, several independent variables\u27 effectiveness varied between the normal scenario and the coronavirus context, as such variables demonstrate a much compelling role to attract donors for the coronavirus relief activations. The analysis is valuable and worthy of different viewpoints. First, understanding the donor\u27s motivation and the success features of funding projects is valuable for fundraisers to have a strategic mindset for decision-making criteria when initiating funding projects to attract more donors and the amount of money. Second, because of the lack of literature focusing on examining the success features for donation-based crowdfunding campaigns, this study fills the gap and further focus on the crowdfunding activations in the context of coronavirus food relief in the US. Therefore, this study provides significant insight to understand the dynamics of the donation-based crowdfunding campaign and provides a recommendation to develop coronavirus relief more efficiently

How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests

Requests are at the core of many social media systems such as question & answer sites and online philanthropy communities. While the success of such requests is critical to the success of the community, the factors that lead community members to satisfy a request are largely unknown. Success of a request depends on factors like who is asking, how they are asking, when are they asking, and most critically what is being requested, ranging from small favors to substantial monetary donations. We present a case study of altruistic requests in an online community where all requests ask for the very same contribution and do not offer anything tangible in return, allowing us to disentangle what is requested from textual and social factors. Drawing from social psychology literature, we extract high-level social features from text that operationalize social relations between recipient and donor and demonstrate that these extracted relations are predictive of success. More specifically, we find that clearly communicating need through the narrative is essential and that that linguistic indications of gratitude, evidentiality, and generalized reciprocity, as well as high status of the asker further increase the likelihood of success. Building on this understanding, we develop a model that can predict the success of unseen requests, significantly improving over several baselines. We link these findings to research in psychology on helping behavior, providing a basis for further analysis of success in social media systems.Comment: To appear at ICWSM 2014. 10pp, 3 fig. Data and other info available at http://www.mpi-sws.org/~cristian/How_to_Ask_for_a_Favor.htm

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

Oregon Capital Scan: A Line is Drawn

This report was written with the primary intention of helping to educate entrepreneurs and growth company leaders with respect to the variety and scale of capital sources currently available in the State. It is not uncommon for those seeking to enter the capital markets as an entrepreneur to possess a limited understanding of where capital can be found. This knowledge gap leads to a level of perceived risk uncertainty that inhibits company formation and growth. This report is not intended to instruct entrepreneurs in the skills required to secure funding, rather it is intended as a catalog of source data to enlighten as to the many different types of capital available. This report is also intended for policy makers and those who work to support the development of a thriving growth company ecosystem in the State. This includes the sponsors of this report who seek to find new ways to bring together education and resources to enhance the ability of those who choose to build their companies in Oregon. This report can serve as a baseline of quantitative data that may help everyone to better understand where we are as a State now, with respect to the key ingredient of growth capital, and help us measure our progress and improvements over time

The Power of Words in Crowdfunding

In this chapter, the authors first provide an overview of the crowdfunding phenomenon. Through the literature review of crowdfunding success factors in the four models, the authors then summarize that the current entrepreneurial research focused on success factors has failed to sufficiently examine how the power of words would affect crowdfunding. Therefore, the authors propose that non-verbal and verbal cues are crucial to entrepreneurial financing success. Based on the insufficient research related with those cues, especially the non-verbal ones, the authors open an area of study on non-verbal and verbal cues in the entrepreneurial financing process by conducting and writing this chapter

Ecomuseums (on Clean Energy), Cycle Tourism and Civic Crowdfunding: A New Match for Sustainability?

An ecomuseum is an \u2018instrument\u2019 to share the interests of a region and protect its cultural, historical and natural heritage. Cycle tourism is a sustainable type of tourism. Civic crowdfunding is a method of raising funds from a community for the fulfilment of civic initiatives. Starting from the literature on the link between cycle tourism and sustainability, the interaction between renewable energy resources and tourism, and finally the place-based dimension of a civic crowdfunding campaign, the purpose of this study is to show that an ecomuseum focused on clean energy has the potential to attract cycle tourists, increase the numbers of funders, as well as attract the interest of the municipality, not-for-profit associations and energy and tourism firms, and thus significantly enhance its beneficial effects on sustainability from economic, social and environmental points of view. This study employed an action research method to gain in-depth knowledge of this issue, as well as a qualitative case study approach to present and discuss the results. The principal result of this study is the identification of a potential way to create sustainability, via the match between an ecomuseum devoted to clean energy, cycle tourism and civic crowdfunding

The Impact of Social Disclosures Within Fixed Rate Peer-to-Peer Lending Markets

Financial journals have just begun to examine the implications of unsecured fixed-rate loans between lenders and borrowers administered over the internet. This study observes 31,550 loans issued between June 2007 and April 2013 with a 36-month term, that are fully paid or charged off, based on a data set from the largest P2P lending website. Initial findings within peer-to-peer (P2P) lending markets have identified that social disclosures may influence these markets. The result of this analysis unambiguously confirms social disclosures influence lenders and the factors significant for funding a loan are inconsistent with the factors significant to repayment of the loan. Prescriptive filters based on social disclosures can improve the likelihood of selecting a creditworthy borrower and increase the models explanatory power. The study finds that distinct forms of social disclosure and specific content within social disclosures predict the amount of funding received and probability of loan repayment

Fast Raising: Digital Fundraising as Interaction Rituals

Twice a year, GamesDoneQuick hosts events that showcase the Speed Running Community, a sub-set of the Video Game Community. Since its inception in 2014 through 2021 GDQ has raised $25.7 million that has been distributed to the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Médecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders). This collection of studies analyzes the Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 event utilizing the Interaction Ritual Theory framework of Randall Collins to understand how ritualistic social action of this community has been leveraged by event organizers to promote successful crowd funding efforts that benefits organizations outside of the community. Further it expands on research into New Social Movements and Participatory Culture to frame and explain the motivations behind this communal process. This study provides evidence to show that interaction ritual chains are present, but failed to accurately identify the specific characteristics of the sacred objects present to link them to the success of rituals. Additionally, it failed to find a link between perceived identity markers of ritual performers with the amount of donations received at the event studied. Lastly, it takes steps to categorize parts of the social action present in the form of donation incentives and describes how those specific incentive types perform in relation to one another