Browsing by Subject "Crowdfunding"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Characteristics of content and social spread strategy on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform
(2013-12) Stern, Joseph S., active 2013; Burns, Neal M, 1933-
As the marketplace for crowdfunding grows to an estimated $5 billion dollars in 2013, academic research exploring the second largest platform Indiegogo has been largely overlooked. This research identifies causal characteristics that differentiate content and social spread strategies across ten technology campaigns on Indiegogo, covering a wide pledge fundraising range from $13,417 to $1,960,503. The researcher’s central hypothesis that better content and spread strategy executions would generate more campaign activity and higher pledges was proven to be generally true, but also an oversimplification of complex variables. Successful campaigns can be defined by both the pledge amount raised and the percent of goal reached, whereas all campaigns surveyed reached over 100% of their set goal. All campaigns selected met three key criteria in that they: launched by April 1st, 2013 and ended before October 15th, 2013, lasted between 31 and 51 days and used a Vimeo video player with open statistics. A five tier framework was designed to classify Blockbuster, Intermediate and Base level performance. Close watch was given to mainly the campaign pitch video followed by page content and social media channels. The pitch video content analysis examines narrative content tactics, technical triggers and pledge participation prompts and found that higher performing campaigns generally aligned with the optimized content analysis units, with some exceptions. There was a strong connection between more video views, especially at the frontend of the campaign, raising greater pledge amounts. Campaigns with more page content comments leveraged higher audience participation and pledges. Social media activity mainly through Facebook Likes had the most impact on pledge participation across campaigns. Video source traffic arrived mostly to the Indiegogo page from social media, email marketing and to a lesser extent from referral blogs and website links. In summary, the characteristics that defined better content and spread strategy executions were certainly related to increased campaign activity and higher pledges, but exhibited complex behaviors requiring more data to comprehensively understand the direct impact on a campaign’s performance.
Creative financing & strategies for mixed-income transit oriented development in Dallas, Texas
(2013-08) Partovi, Lauren Neda; Wilson, Barbara B. (Barbara Brown)
This study evaluates the current environment for mixed-income transit oriented development along DART rail within the city limits of Dallas. A close look at income and racial disparity is used as the foundation for advocating for a more proactive and aggressive approach to the development of affordable units proximate to affordable transportation choices. Assembling financing for mixed-income TOD projects is especially challenging, and multiple layers of federal, state, and city funding mechanisms are required for achieving the capital requirements of the development. Both typical affordable housing funding methods and new and nontraditional funding methods for multifamily housing were researched and evaluated with the intention to propose possibilities for catalyzing development in DART station areas within the City of Dallas that have, to this point, experienced underdevelopment.
Crowdfunding the museum : fad or future
(2015-05) Erb, Elise Kathryn; Mayer, Melinda M.; Bolin, Paul E
In recent years, fundraising professionals and scholars have studied the potential use of crowdfunding as part of a well-rounded fundraising plan (Bœuf, Darveau, & Legoux, 2014; Boyle, 2013; Bump, 2014; Spirer, 2014; Tugend, 2014). As more museums experiment with crowdfunding, little in-depth study into this form of fundraising has occurred. Because crowdfunding is a technology-based method of fundraising, it has the potential to engage donors all over the world in meaningful relationships with museums. This thesis attempts to answer the question of whether crowdfunding is a passing fad or part of the future for fundraising in museums. This illustrative case study (Yin, 2009) focused on the applications and implications of the use of crowdfunding in museums. Specifically, it examined the campaign run by the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in the summer of 2010 to raise $30,000 to conserve five costumes from the film Gone with the Wind. The dresses would be on display in the HRC’s 2014 exhibition The Making of Gone with the Wind. This research sought to determine the implications of crowdfunding for organizational culture, fundraising strategies, audience development, education, and uses of technology. This research used case study research methodology (Gerring, 2007; Lapan, Quartaroli & Riemer, 2007; Merriam, 2009; Thomas, 2011; Yin, 2009) to gather and analyze data including interviews with six staff members directly involved in the campaign, the campaign website, and written comments from donors, and quantitative reports relating to the HRC crowdfunding effort provided additional data sources. The ultimate goal in researching this topic was to contribute to an understanding of the role fundraising could play in reaching contemporary audiences and donors. From the data, nine themes emerged that reveal the study's key findings. Synthesis of the data also yielded recommendations for successful crowdfunding campaigns in museums.
Crowdsourcing and the law
(2012-05) Wolfson, Stephen Manuel; Lease, Matthew A.; Howison, James
With the development and proliferation of new social and connective technologies, crowdsourcing is becoming a viable method for conducting many types of work. At the same time, however, these developments are progressing more quickly than the law and raising new legal questions that often do not have definite answers yet. This thesis address some of these legal issues that crowdsourcing raises. In this thesis, we begin by addressing four areas that might lead to legal problems in the near future. First, we look at the labor and employment law issues that might arise from online crowdlabor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) and oDesk (www.odesk.com). Then we discuss inventorship issues under patent law that services like InnoCentive might experience. Next, we consider how data security laws could be problematic for open innovation projects like the Netflix challenge. Finally, we explore potential intellectual property ownership problems under copyright law. After discussing these topics, this thesis then turns to examine in detail the area of crowdfunding. As the name suggests, crowdfunding refers to process of raising money through crowdsourcing. Until recently, one type of crowdfunding known as crowdfinance was largely illegal under federal securities laws. However, the law in this area is starting to change. In this chapter, we look at four different models for crowdfunding: donation, lending, reward/prepurchase, and equity investment. Following that, we consider how federal securities regulation might apply to crowdfunding, particularly the equity investment model. Finally we conduct a content analysis of three legislative proposals to create a limited exemption for crowdfunding in securities law that the U.S. Congress recently considered. Finally, we assess how crowdsourcing platforms use private contracts to bind their users to certain terms and conditions. This chapter begins with a primer on contract law. Then we examine the enforceability of standardized online agreements. Following that, we review several provisions that are common to nearly all crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, we conduct a content analysis of the specific Terms of Use contracts of several crowdsourcing platforms.
Essays in dynamic experimentation
(2017-08-11) Domnenko, Gleb; Stinchcombe, Maxwell; Sibley, David S. (David Summer), 1947-; Wiseman, Thomas E; Whinston, Andrew B
Innovation and knowledge are critical for the development of the modern economy. I design and study dynamic models for the funding of new research under different economic conditions. In the first essay, I develops a model for the funding of R&D initiated by an entrepreneur. In the model, the funding is undertaken by a large homogeneous pool of investors. The entrepreneur can bank present investment funds for either future experimentation or diversion. R&D activities are not observable. There are two main conclusions. First, even when entrepreneurs have full bargaining power, commitment and incentive problems imply that R&D is usually inefficiently funded. Second, stronger reporting enforcement can be welfare enhancing and improves the outcomes for the entrepreneur. In the second essay, I study funding of the projects at the early stages of the startup development. I search for the best feasible contract that can be signed by the entrepreneur and the investor. The contract provides dynamic incentives to work on the risky project in the presence of convex effort costs, private valuations, and developed credit markets. I reveal that the best feasible contract satisfies three main properties: funding is provided independent of the project failure or success; private valuations are internalized; and the work on the project does not stop until the project succeeds. In the third essay, I study how venture capitalists provide funds to entrepreneurs to finance risky projects that exhibit diminishing returns to scale. I show that the funding rates strictly decrease in time in the full information and the observable but unverifiable information environments. In the unobservable information environment, the funding rates eventually become strictly decreasing, but they may increase in the beginning.
Financing new ideas : evidence from Kickstarter campaigns
(2022-08-11) Serrano, Jonathan; Cohn, Jonathan B.; Almazan, Andres; Fracassi, Cesare; Anderson, Stephen J
In this dissertation, I study the crowdfunding market and the importance of access to financing for early stage entrepreneurs. Using a novel and rich dataset of crowdfunding projects from Kickstarter, the world's largest crowdfunding platform, I begin by showing that entrepreneurs who launch campaigns on days when many other entrepreneurs launch campaigns are less likely to reach their campaign funding goals and be funded. My evidence suggests that three main factors are responsible for this relationship: 1) capital supply, 2) capital allocation, and 3) investor limited attention. First, while the supply of capital increases with the number of campaigns launched, this increase is not enough to match the increase in the demand for capital. Second, crowdfunding campaigns that are very likely to succeed based on ex-ante characteristics are able to raise more financing at the expense of less promising campaigns. Third, this allocation is partly explained by investors' limited attention, which seem to cluster towards certain campaigns when their ability to screen projects suffers as the number of campaigns launched increases. In the second part of the dissertation, I exploit the source of luck-driven variation in funding outcome introduced by the number of campaigns launched to examine how access to external financing affects entrepreneurial success and future entrepreneurial activity. Using machine learning to match crowdfunding campaigns with a self-collected dataset of Amazon searches, I estimate a significant causal effect of crowdfunding on the likelihood that an entrepreneur commercializes their subject idea, becomes a serial entrepreneur, and successfully raises capital for future projects. My findings suggest that limited attention and capital supply play an important role in determining which projects receive crowdfunding and that funding success has a causal effect on different entrepreneurial outcomes.
Gender and the crowd : differential effectiveness of justifications used by entrepreneurs in their crowdfunding pitches
(2019-06-18) Srinivas, Santosh B.; Martins, Luis L.; Burris, Ethan R.; Gray, Steven M.; Rindova, Violina P.
In this dissertation, I examine gender differences in entrepreneurs’ access to financial capital in crowdfunding settings. Using Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) theory of justification, I conceptualize the varied ways entrepreneurs legitimate and justify their funding requests on crowdfunding platforms. Contextualizing to prosocial crowdfunding - online platforms that connect entrepreneurs seeking financial capital to resource providers who are motivated by the desire to benefit others - I theorize about gender differences in the effectiveness of various types of justifications. More specifically, building on research on prosocial behaviors and literature on gender differences in values, attitudes, behaviors, and information processing, I develop hypotheses about (1) differences in the justifications women and men entrepreneurs use in their crowdfunding pitches; (2) differential effects the use of specific justifications have on raising capital through prosocial crowdfunding avenues for women and men entrepreneurs, and (3) differences in the appeal of justifications to women and men prosocial crowdfunding investors. I test predictions using a dataset of pitches made on a microlending-based prosocial crowdfunding platform. In Study 1 based on a sample of US pitches, I largely find support for the gender effect on entrepreneurs’ use of justifications predicted based on gender role theory. Findings suggest that women entrepreneurs are more likely than men entrepreneurs to use inspired and domestic justifications, and less likely than men entrepreneurs to use civic, market, and industrial justifications in their crowdfunding pitches. In Study 2, drawing on a multi-country sample of crowdfunding pitches, I show that entrepreneurs are more likely to succeed in crowdfunding when using justifications that emphasize the emancipatory potential of their undertakings. More specifically, I find that women and men entrepreneurs are more likely to succeed in raising financial capital when they use emancipatory justifications that counteract certain stereotypical gender expectations. Similarly drawing on a multi-country sample of pitches, I observe in Study 3 that women and men prosocial investors on crowdfunding platforms, contrary to expectations, do not differ much in their preferences towards pitches using specific justifications. I discuss how the findings extend the literature and outline the limitations of studies.
A real estate crowdfunding model for social impact : The Alley Flat Initiative in Austin, Texas
(2016-05) Latorre, Jose Vicente; Wegmann, Jake; Stiphany, Kristine Marie
The signing of the Jumpstart Our Businesses (JOBS) Act on April 5th, 2012 has unleashed the potential of crowdfunding for private ventures in the US. The changes on regulation imposed by the JOBS Act and the development of online platforms for crowdfunding have revealed the potential of crowdfunding as an alternative funding mechanism for projects in diverse industries, including real estate. The real estate crowdfunding sector will continue to grow, especially since the implementation of Title III of the Jobs Act in October 2015, which allows for non-accredited investors to participate in the equity crowdfunding industry. This research project studies the potential of real estate crowdfunding as an alternative financing option for projects related to the equitable and sustainable development of urban communities. Specifically, the study is centered on the financing of “reasonably affordable” rental ADUs on legacy homeowner properties in East Austin – a housing infill model proposed by The Alley Flat Initiative. City of Austin ordinances promoting the development of ADUs, approved in November 2015, and an affordability crisis connected to rapid growth of the city make the study of financing alternatives for affordable ADUs relevant and necessary. Findings reveal that the real estate equity and peer-to-peer lending crowdfunding models, at the time of study, do not offer a convincing alternative for legacy homeowners to pursue the development of ADUs in their properties. Major limitations stand in the way of a crowdfunded Alley Flat project. However, the research presents recommendations that could contribute to more attainable models of crowdfunding financing for individual homeowners.
Startup storytelling : an analysis of narrative in rewards and equity based crowdfunding campaigns
(2018-01-24) Murphy, Melissa Lynne; Barbour, Joshua B.; Browning , Larry D; Donovan, Erin E; Mackie , Kathleen S
Crowdfunding campaigns have experienced explosive growth in visibility and popularity for entrepreneurs seeking early stage funding (Zeoli, 2015). Entrepreneurs create and manage crowdfunding campaigns through web platforms (e.g., Kickstarter, IndieGoGo) that facilitate interaction between founders, funders, and investors. These online platforms offer opportunities for entrepreneurs seeking investment to craft a pitch and utilize storytelling to connect them to networks outside traditional sources of venture capital. Because storytelling is cited as a critical communication skill for entrepreneurs (Martens, Jennings, & Jennings, 2007; Roddick, 2000), research is needed to understand how narratives can produce desirable outcomes such as perceptions of legitimacy and credibility for entrepreneurs and how entrepreneurs marshal narratives in efforts to secure funding. Drawing on research in entrepreneurship, crowdfunding, and narrative persuasion, this dissertation investigates the content and effects of messages in crowdfunding campaigns guided by two research questions: First, how do entrepreneurs use narratives in crowdfunding campaigns? Second, how does the presence of narrative in campaigns affect the success of crowdfunding campaigns? To answer these questions, I conducted a thematic analysis of existing crowdfunding campaign messages (c = 96) and an experimental comparison of low-narrative and high-narrative messages to identify the type of messages that raise the most funding and resonate with participants (N = 457). The thematic analysis of technology-based reward and equity-based crowdfunding campaign videos revealed the use of narrative elements (narration, characters, chronology) but not fully developed narratives. A subset of the campaigns featured ‘mini-narratives’ or short, problem-solution-based descriptions of products narrated by the founders of the technology. Building on this analysis, the experiment examined perceptions of crowdfunding campaigns by comparing low-narrative and high-narrative videos. The experimental findings demonstrate that crowdfunding campaigns that feature a higher degree of narrative result in higher (a) perceptions of personal relevance, other relevance, entrepreneur credibility, (b) understanding and legitimacy as well as (c) decisions to invest and intention to share the campaign interpersonally and through social media. Taken together, the findings suggest that entrepreneurs who are not yet realizing or heeding advice to tell their story, they should.