Leveraging customers as investors : The driving forces behind crowdfunding

Crowdfunding describes the emerging phenomenon of raising financing from a large audience via the Internet. The purpose of this thesis is to describe what factors influence individuals to invest in crowdfunding projects and to test their explanatory strength of how much someone invests. A conceptual framework is developed and a study of 735 individuals was conducted on three international crowdfunding platforms. The findings show that trust is important and that the individuals are mainly driven by willingness to help, to support a good cause and to be part of a project realization. The study also shows that some of the factors have a significant relationship to the investment size; however, these factors can only explain a small part of the investments. The thesis provides some tentative insights and implications on how to successfully raise financing through crowdfunding and takes a further step towards explaining this new phenomenon