Creating shared-value in the digital era: The role of donation-based crowdfunding

Objectives. Creating shared value in the digital era increasingly represents one of the most important challenges for contemporary for-profit and non-profit organizations (NPOs). In this context, crowdfunding has emerged as an interesting platform to gather financial resources and foster the sustainability of NPOs by creating social and economic value. Building on the norm of reciprocity and functionalist motivation theory, a conceptual model is presented unpacking the relationship between motivations to donate and future intention to re-donate. Methodology. Data were collected from a sample of 129 donors actively operating on digital crowdfunding platforms of a particular type of NPOs, namely bank charitable foundations, located in Italy. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to validate the proposed model. The hypothesized relationships were empirically tested using structural equation modelling (SEM). Findings. Prosocial gratitude - a form of positive reciprocity - and civic engagement behavior resulted as significant mediators of the relationship between donors’ general motivation to donate and their future intention to re-donate. Practical implications. The findings provide interesting insights on the use of digital crowdfunding platforms aimed at diffusing shared-value in organizations and in the society in general. Managers of NPOs such as bank charitable foundations should invest in specific strategic levers, i.e. positive reciprocity and civic engagement, to improve the effectiveness of donation-based crowdfunding. Originality of the study. Donation-based crowdfunding is increasingly receiving attention by management literature and practitioners. Focusing on the psycho-social mechanisms explaining donors’ motivation to donate, this paper offers an explorative analysis of these scarcely investigated mechanisms. Hence, novel insights to the socio-economic development of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and the Third Sector are provided. Moreover, this is one of the few researches exploring the phenomenon of donation-based crowdfunding in Italy.