Digital Crowdfunding for Social Entrepreneurship: Best Practices for Building Sustainable Communities

Digital technology has broadened the horizon for social enterprises (e.g. WakaWaka) to use digital crowdfunding platforms (e.g. Kickstarter and Crowdfunder) to pool resources to build resilient and sustainable communities. However, digital crowdfunding success rates remain low, and support is needed for adopting digital technology and making a success of digital crowdfunding.

Disparity exists in access to digital crowdfunding between the technology-rich Global North, the world’s developed countries, and the digitally-divided Global South, the world’s developing countries. Their different institutional environment must be considered to bridge the North-South divide and address digital inequality.

We aim to address this issue through investigating the critical success factors of digital crowdfunding, drawing on interdisciplinary insights from entrepreneurship, computer science and finance. By investigating a combination of factors related to social entrepreneurs as crowdfunders, their project quality, their project websites, and their institutional environment in the Global North and the Global South, we will develop best practices for digital crowdfunding platforms. 

Catherine Wang is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Brunel Business School and the Founder of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at Brunel University London. She is also a Fellow of British Academy of Management, a Fellow of British Academy of Management Peer Review College, a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, and an editorial board member of the British Journal of Management, the International Journal of Management Reviews, and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research.

Catherine’s research interests are at the intersection of strategic management, entrepreneurship and innovation, in particular, how firms can turn strategic and entrepreneurial resources and capabilities into successful innovation and create economic and social value in commercial and social enterprises, based on interdisciplinary theory, methods and practice. In recent years, Catherine is particularly interested in digital, social and sustainable entrepreneurship.

Specifically, Catherine has made significant contributions to theory and practice in these areas: dynamic capabilities, entrepreneurial learning, entrepreneurial orientation, and organisational ambidexterity. She has published prolifically in these areas, and her work has received high citations, inspiring researchers in the field to collectively advance theory and practice. She has been recognised as one of the top 2% of business and management researchers worldwide in a study by Stanford University published by Elsevier, based on citation scores based on data in October 2024.