Platforms for the people: Enabling civic crowdfunding through the cultivation of institutional infrastructure

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Research Summary: Digital platforms offer a promising contemporary means for encouraging social innovation through cross-sector collaboration. Yet although such “social-mission platforms” are equipped to facilitate a high number of arms-length transactions, they are conversely ill-equipped to provide the necessary consensus which typically characterizes successful examples of cross-sector collaboration. Employing an in-depth archival case study of a civic crowdfunding platform, we surface a process model of social-mission platform creation, which exposes the dilemmas such platforms encounter as they attempt to navigate user growth, and the importance of institutional infrastructure for overcoming these dilemmas. These findings and our emergent model thus contribute new theory regarding the creation of digital platforms for enabling cross-sector collaboration and social innovation, while bridging the emerging body of research on platforms with institutional theory. Managerial Summary: Developing a digital platform for social good requires operators to maintain control over their mission as they grow, while working with actors from across sectors. While the economics of the platform may be clear, the social infrastructure to ensure effective and mission-aligned interaction between different segments of the platform needs to be developed. In our case study of a civic crowdfunding platform, we demonstrate how this platform strategically generates and promotes understandings of its boundaries, creates bridges between diverse stakeholders necessary for participation, and provides blueprints to shape and standardize platform interactions. We also discuss the potential susceptibility of social-mission platforms to experience mission drift as they grow, the existential threat that such drift poses in this context, and the ways that organizations might overcome this threat