Charitable versus commercial crowdfunding: Which is more successful on StartLab?

Abstract

Crowdfunding is currently one of the funding options for charitable non-profit projects created by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This paper aims to analyse the charity projects created by NGOs and individuals on crowdfunding platforms and then compare them with commercial crowdfunding, emphasizing the success factors of charity campaigns. The data is from the crowdfunding portal StartLab from 2015 to 2022. The main methods are comparison, descriptive and correlation analysis concerning project categories and seasonality. From the investigation results, it can be concluded that charity projects are more successful in conducting crowdfunding campaigns than commercial projects. For practitioners, it might be of interest that the length of the campaign and seasonality significantly influence the project's success. In the case of Slovakia, it is recommended to set a shorter campaign and run it from October to December.