Hui, Greenberg, Gerber. “Understanding the Role of Community in Crowdfunding Work” Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2014.
Discussion Leader: Sanchit
Crowdsourcing example: Ushahidi – Website
Summary:
This paper discusses several popular crowdfunding platforms and the common interactions that project designers have with the crowd in order for them to get properly funded and supported. The authors describe crowdfunding as a practice designed to solicit financial support from a distributed network of several hundred to thousands of supporters on the internet. The practice is a type of entrepreneurial work in that they both require “discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities to introduce novel products, services, and organizations”. With crowdfunding, a niche has to be discovered and evaluated so the target crowd can be convinced to provide financial support in return for a novel product or service that would benefit both the supporters and the project initiator.
Crowdfunding in recent times is almost entirely dependent on online communities like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. The authors talk about the importance of having a large online presence because word of mouth through the internet travels much faster than any other medium. By personally reaching out to people in social media, project creators allow a trustworthy relationship to develop between the crowd and them and this can lead to more people funding the project.
The authors conducted a survey of 47 crowdfunding project creators that ranged from a variety of different project ideas and backgrounds. Some creators ended up having successful crowdfunding projects and made a good margin to continue developing and distributing their proposed product. Others weren’t as lucky since some people lacked a strong online presence which turns out to be one of the most important aspects of having a successful crowdfunding project.
According to the authors, a crowdfunding project requires five tasks in the project’s lifespan. (1) Preparing the initial campaign design and ideas, (2) testing the campaign material, (3) publicizing the project the public through social media, (4) following through with project promises and goals, and (5) giving back to the crowdfunding community. It turns out that coming up with a novel idea or product is a very small portion of the entire story of crowdfunding. The process of designing an appealing campaign was very daunting for several creators because they had never worked with video editing or design software before. Ideas for design and promotion mostly came from inspiration blogs and even paid mentors. Testing these campaign ideas was done through an internal network of supporters and some even skipped the step to instead gain feedback when they eventually got supporters. Publicizing depended largely on weather or not the product got picked up by a popular news source or social media account. If creators got lucky, they would have enough funding to support their project and be able to deliver the product to the supporters. However, even this task was difficult for the majority of the creators who were working alone on the project and didn’t have enough resources to add additional people for assistance. Lastly, almost all creators wished to give back to the crowdfunding community by funding projects that their supporters create in the future or by providing advice to future crowdfunding creators.
Reflection:
Overall, I thought the paper was a fairly straightforward summary and overview of what happens behind-the-scenes in a crowdfunding project. I have personally seen several Kickstarter campaigns for cool and nifty gadgets primarily through Reddit or Facebook. This shows that unless someone actively looks for crowdsourcing projects, a majority of these projects are stumbled upon through social media websites by other people. Popularity plays a huge part in the success of a crowdfunding project and it makes perfect sense that it does. Having a product that is popular amongst a majority of people will become funded quicker, so creating a product and convincing campaign associated with it is equally important. These social engineering tasks aren’t everyone’s cup of tea though. I can totally relate to the author’s comments on artistic people having a better fundraising background than scientific researchers which allows them to create a much more convincing campaign and have a very forward approach in trying to recruit support using social media platforms. These skills aren’t really drilled into researchers to convince peers that their research is important since their work should speak for itself.
While reading through the paper I also noticed how much additional baggage and onus one has to take responsibility for in order to get a project funded. Creating videos, posters, graphics, t-shirts, gifts and eventually/hopefully delivering the final product to customers is a very demanding process. It’s no wonder that some of these people spend part-time job hours just maintaining their online presence. I personally don’t see this being used as a primary source of income because there is way too much overhead and risk involved to expect any sort of reasonable payback. This is especially true when most of the funded money is used for creating and delivering product and then eventually giving back the money to other community projects. With crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon MTurk, there is at least a guarantee that some amount of money will be made, no matter how small. If you play the game smart, then at the very least it’s easy beer money. With crowdfunding, a project gaining enormous traction, let alone reaching its goal is a big gamble dependent on a lot of other variable factors than just pure objective work-skill.
The tools and websites designed to aid crowdfunding campaigns are definitely helpful and are honestly expected to exist at this point. Whenever there is a crowd-based technology, I feel like Reddit immediately forms a subreddit dedicated to it and there is constant chatter, suggestions and ideas for success. Similarly, people who want to help themselves and others develop tools to make project development easier and stress free. These tools and forums are great places for general advice, but I agree with the authors in that it is not personal. The idea of having an MTurk based feedback system for crowdfunding campaigns is a brilliant and easy-to-implement one. Just linking the project page and asking for feedback for a higher than average cost will provide a lot of detailed suggestions to help convince future supporters to fund a project.
Overall, the idea of crowdfunding is great, but I wish the paper touched on the fees that Kickstarter and some other crowdfunding platforms take to provide this service to people. It is a cost that people should consider when and if deciding to start a crowdfunding project no matter how big or small.
Discussion:
- Have you guys contributed to crowdfunding projects? Or ever created a project? Any interesting project ideas that you found?
- Do you agree with the occupational gap the author hinted at? i.e. Artistic project creators have an easier time than scientific project creators for crowdfunding.
- Thoughts on having incentives for donating or funding a larger amount than other people? Good idea or will people be skeptical of the success of the project regardless and still donate the minimum amount?
- Would you use Kickstarter to donate for poverty/disaster-stricken areas than donate to a reputable charity? There are several donation based projects and I wonder why people would trust those more than charities.
