A study into the factors that contribute to the success of crowdgiving campaigns and the role they play in donor motivations

UK based charities are increasingly facing changing donor attitudes and demographics within a volatile economic environment, creating a pressing need to diversify their income streams. This research seeks to present crowdgiving to UK charities as a viable fundraising mechanism, by providing an understanding of what the factors are that lead to campaign’s successfully reaching their funding goals. Grounded on the small amount of literature available on crowdgiving within a charity fundraising and marketing context, this dissertation provides a deeper view of charitable giving in the UK, how it is changing as donor preference is shifting to digital giving and what the charity sector’s response is to the evolving environment. Crowdgiving success factors are derived from wider literature in areas such as marketing, venture capital, finance and entrepreneurship research, to form a theoretical model that also incorporates a donor motivations dimension. Content analysis is undertaken on data extracted from crowdgiving campaigns, and validated by charity fundraising and marketing practitioners. The data findings are analysed using the suggested model as a framework, proving that each factor exists within a supporting role to the pitch, which is the only factor that is able to function in isolation. Analysis discussion centres on the donor motivations’ dimension in the model comparing them with success factors and how the two interact. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the research’s shortcomings. For example, interviews could have been conducted with the owners of the crowdgiving campaigns analysed in order to provide deeper perspectives on the success factors. This could be included in future research as well as examining the likelihood of charities adopting crowdgiving as a tool on their own websites