Analysis of success factors in crowdfunding projects based on rewards: A way to obtain financing for socially committed projects

Abstract

This paper examines the determinants that influence crowdfunding success. In particular, this study focuses on reward-based crowdfunding, in which funders receive a reward for supporting a project. By studying hand-collected data from 335 reward-based crowdfunding projects and 33,036 investment decisions from the Spanish Goteo platform and using the ordinary least squares regression, the negative binomial, the logit and the Cox proportional hazard models, we highlight the factors that explain the success of a project. We find statistically significant results for crowdfunding project success for the following variables: location, experience, human capital and gender. Thus, the success of crowdfunding campaigns depends on the experience of the project members since it lends credibility to the project. Furthermore, the geographic location variable indicates that crowdfunding success is higher in projects located in Spain than in those located outside of Spain. Our results also suggest that crowdfunding related to the support of social impact initiatives that involve the ecological typology does not perform well.