Determinants of Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns: Evidence from Russian Crowdfunding Platform Boomstarter

Abstract

According to practice, about half of the projects on crowdfunding sites (based on rewards) do not collect the declared amount of funding. This is largely due to the lack of experience in running crowdfunding campaigns and ignoring important factors that are important to take into account when managing crowdfunding campaigns. Many foreign publications have studied the nature of the influence of various determinants on the success of fundraising on crowdfunding platforms, in particular, on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Ulule, Eppela and others. As for research on Russian crowdfunding platforms, there is an extremely small number of such studies. Based on the construction of OLS regressions for 300 projects from July 2020 to May 2022 by the end date of the project from the Russian crowdfunding platform Boomstarter, we firstly obtained that such determinants as choosing a reasonable financial goal of the project, the number of sponsors, the number
of project comments and the availability of video materials about the project have a positive impact on the success of the crowd campaign. In addition, we have developed a model based on logit regression testing, which has a high predictive power. This model can be used to predict the results of a crowd campaign with given parameters.

In further research in this area, it is possible to increase the number of observations, change the set of factors that potentially affect the success of a project’s fundraising on crowdfunding platforms, and also consider the influence of factors depending on the category of the project. A promising area of research is the analysis of social interactions between investors in the framework of crowdfunding campaigns and the identification of the nature of the dependence of the volume of collected financial resources throughout the entire project financing cycle in the Russian market.