I segreti del successo delle campagne di crowdfunding delle imprese sociali italiane

Crowdfunding is an innovative financing instrument, which succeeded in changing the rules of corporate finance. This is true not only for traditional entrepreneurship, but also for social enterprise, which may use crowdfunding for economic support and also as a way of legitimizing its own social innovation projects. In this perspective, this paper aims at identifying and analyzing the factors of success of social enterprises’ crowdfunding campaigns within Italian context, which is characterized by an extreme dynamism and a substantial fragmentation. This contribution provides also an operative support to social innovators in planning and efficiently managing their campaigns. We conducted an empirical investigation on 253 crowdfunding campaigns launched by social enterprises on Italian platforms. The focus of this analysis was on three different types of drivers: the network of analyzed social enterprise, the features of selected crowdfunding platform and the design of the campaign. The results showed how the very presence of a social enterprise on social network, the choice of a specific reward-based platform and the active management of campaign have a remarkable impact on the effective achievement of the financing objective of the campaign.