The contribution of crowdfunding for philanthropy: A review and theoretical framework of reward- and donation-based crowdfunding

Which key mechanisms are central to giving via philanthropic crowdfunding? Philanthropic crowdfunding refers to donation- and reward-based crowdfunding, an academic field in which studies contributed limited to no effort to developing a theoretical explanation explaining why a mechanism
would impact giving. As a result, we are left with a series of empirical accounts without a clear theoretical background or an explanation behind the suggested mechanisms. We developed a theoretical framework by first categorising the empirical findings reported in the 195 studies, which resulted in four crowdfunding features impacting giving, namely the (1) project creator, (2) social
information, (3) rewards, and (4) project description. As a next step, we explain why these features impact giving (i.e. mediators), by integrating them with insights from several fields of social sciences and deriving specific giving mechanisms. We conclude that with impacting donations via crowdfunding, three general giving themes exist: being affected by (1) a project's quality, (2) social
connection and/or (3) rewards. The categorisation of mechanisms for giving via crowdfunding adds to an emerging area of research. It allows initiators to extract best practice examples for increasing the probability of successful crowdfunding projects considering the mechanisms for giving.