When Pledges Meet Meaning – A Crowdfunding Story

This study explores what motivates people to give monetary support in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding web platforms are exponentially growing, mainly due to the social media revolution that emerged and developed in the last two decades, which enables individuals or projects to receive funding from a mass of private individuals. This phenomenon created a new form of charity giving. The reward-based crowdfunding mechanism creates a singular reciprocal interaction where different types of rewards such as gifts or participation in the event can be used as proxies for different types of motivation. These can be examined and compared with each other and with other relevant predictors. Using sociological and psychological theories, I classify rewards into four main categories (gifts, recognition, participation, and influence), and situate these within Viktor Frankl's concept of the 'will to meaning', as a theory to understand what motivates funders. I also scrutinise sociocultural and gender differences, as well as the role of extrinsic and intrinsic incentives, within perceived meaning and monetary support.

The thesis examines the effect of different motivations (proxied by different rewards) on the relative and absolute amount donated. This is done by using contrived-setting lab experiments and a field experiment, analysed through the generalised linear model, nonparametric tests, and thematic analysis. Unlike recent studies that scrutinise specific categories in crowdfunding (such as music or environment) and commonly use existing data from crowdfunding platforms, I generate a novel dataset from experiments. This allows me to examine predictors I believe to have influence on monetary giving, within four different crowdfunding categories (art, music, for-profit, and non-profit).

The first and main finding concerns the essential impact of meaning as motivation for monetary support decisions, which supports Viktor Frankl's will to meaning and logotherapy. Rewards, such as gifts, recognition, participation and influence, carry different meanings to different people. I find that the effect of the chosen reward on funders’ perceived meaning is sometimes stronger than the effect of the cause to which they donate to. Funders within different campaigns show similar levels of perceived meaning (except for for-profit that shows relatively low average perceived meaning). Within a given campaign, however, the different types of rewards were each associated with a different level of perceived meaning. Overall, higher levels of perceived meaning from crowdfunding generate higher amounts of monetary support. Secondly, examining gender-perceived meaning when gifts rewards are excluded or offered to funders reveals that gifts are more crucial to men than they are to women. Thirdly, sociocultural differences are found in pledging behaviour when the funders' country of birth is examined. Fourthly, I find that there is an essential role for gift incentives as part of the need for reciprocity and gift dominance compared to the other three offered rewards. Fifthly, the role of gifts and recognition as extrinsic incentives in crowdfunding is examined in this research as part of the over-justification effect. Although excluding gifts induce slightly higher average monetary support, excluding both gift and recognition leads to lower levels of average monetary support. These findings lead to developing self-determination theory and cognitive evaluation theory, and suggesting the importance of the presence of extrinsic incentives (controlled) in enhancing intrinsic motivations (autonomous). Sixthly, in addition to the behavioural study of motivation, the study asked participants to explain their monetary giving after choosing a reward. These self-declared motivations are analysed in relation to the donations observed experimentally. This thematic analysis reveals important motivations such as fairness and need to help. These findings reinforce the main result coming out from the quantitative lab experiments relating to the role of perceived meaning– generated from taking part in the crowdfunding and choosing a reward– on monetary support levels. It is the first study on crowdfunding that combines contrived-setting lab and field experiments together with qualitative textual analysis.

Findings and insights that emerge from this thesis contribute to the research on motivation, funding and behavioural studies in general. Simultaneously, the research is likely to have implications for campaign creators designing crowdfunding campaigns to maximise their receipts.