Crowdfunding Practices for Social Projects: An Experiment of Co-Creation

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to understand the impact of crowdfunding platforms used to gain support for social enterprises. Crowdfunding is an emergent and growing practice all over the world. The main use of crowdfunding nowadays is to support cultural and social projects, and this paper has a special interest in understanding the support that social enterprises receive from crowdfunding platforms, namely, through websites. There are several kinds of crowdfunding, but the donation-based orientation is the most popular model to support social projects and the focus of this study. A factorial experiment was conducted to test the traits’ behaviour. Our results show that the use of crowdfunding platforms leads supporters to build more favourable values of social enterprises when compared with nonsocial enterprises on crowdfunding platforms and social projects with traditional funding practices.