Crowdfunding for Social Enterprises: An Exploratory Analysis of the Italian Context

Crowdfunding has been recognized by media narrations as a disruptive approach to funding social entrepreneurship while there is a lack of evidence in academic literature about those factors that are able to support social entrepreneurs in developing successful crowdfunding campaign. This paper is aimed to improve academic knowledge on those elements that can effectively support social entrepreneurs in managing their campaigns. An empirical analysis on 250 CF campaigns launched by Italian social enterprises was carried out. We focus on the effect on the overall funding level achieved of three main type of issues: the social enterprise’s network, the choice of the CF platform, and the CF campaign’s design. Our results show how the social enterprise’s presence on Twitter, the choice of a specific reward-based platform, and an active management of the CF campaign have a significant impact on the achievement of the funding goal.