The value of completing crowdfunding projects

Crowdfunding systems are social media websites that allow people to donate small amounts of money that add up to fund valuable larger projects. These websites are structured around projects: finite campaigns with well-defined goals, end dates, and completion criteria. We use a dataset from an existing crowdfunding website — the school charity Donors Choose — to understand the value of completing projects. We find that completing a project is an important act that leads to larger do-nations (over twice as large), greater likelihood of re-turning to donate again, and few projects that expire close but not complete. A conservative estimate sug-gests that this completion bias led to over $15 million in increased donations to Donors Choose, representing approximately 16 % of the total donations for the period under study. This bias suggests that structuring many types of collaborative work as a series of projects might increase contribution significantly. Many social media creators find it rather difficult to motivate users to actively participate and contribute their time, energy, or money to make a site valuable to others. The value in social media largely derives from interactions between and among people who are working together to achieve common goals. To encourage people to participate and contribute, so-cial media creators regularly look for different ways of struc-turing participation. Some use a blog-type format, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. Some use a collaborative doc-ument format like Wikipedia. And some use a project-based format. A project is a well-defined set of tasks that needs to be accomplished. Projects usually have a well-defined end goal — something that needs to be accomplished for the project to be considered a success — and an end date — a day by which the project needs to be completed. Much work in society is structured around projects; for example, Holly-wood makes movies by organizing each movie’s production as a project, hiring a new crew for each movie. Construction companies organize their work as a sequence of projects. And projects are common in knowledge-work based busi-nesses (Hemphill 2009). Copyright c © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificia