Platforms business model in the Italian civic crowdfunding market: An empirical analysis

Civic crowdfunding is a type of crowdfunding through which a community can finance public goods or services of public interest in total or partial (match funding) substitution of funding by the public sector. For public bodies, civic crowdfunding is an alternative (or complementary) method of collecting financial resources because it allows financing public goods or services while reducing public deficits. This paper examines the operational and business models of the platforms that provide civic crowdfunding campaigns to understand their consistency with the principal decisive factors driving the success of civic crowdfunding campaigns. To achieve this result, we investigated all Italian crowdfunding platforms involved in civic crowdfunding campaigns (i.e., reward and donation platforms). We found extreme diversity in the characteristics of the Italian platforms engaged in civic crowdfunding campaigns, and a significant dispersion of civic projects seeking funds through the Italian crowdfunding platforms. Civic crowdfunding remains a new field of interest in academic research, particularly in relation to the structure of the provider of this service (i.e., supply-side market). As far as we know, this is the first empirical study conducted on the Italian civic crowdfunding market.