Understanding crowdfunding work: implications for support tools

Abstract

Crowdfunding is changing the way people realize their work by providing a new way to gain support from a distributed audience. This study seeks to understand the work of crowdfunding project creators in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems. We conducted interviews with 30 project creators from three popular crowdfunding platforms in order to understand what tasks are involved and what tools people use to accomplish crowdfunding work. Initial results suggest that project creators carry out three main types of work-preparing the campaign material, marketing the project, and following through with project goals-and have adapted general support tools to facilitate doing this work. From our initial findings, we hope to improve and design future crowdfunding support tools and systems.