Non-profit differentials in crowd-based financing: Evidence from 50,000 campaigns

We use data from approximately 50,000 crowdfunding projects to assess the relative funding performance of for-profit and non-profit campaigns. We find that non-profit projects are significantly more likely to reach their minimum funding goals and that they receive more money from the average funding provider. At the same time, however, they have fewer funding providers and obtain lower total funding amounts. Our analysis shows that these results are driven by a small number of very successful for-profit projects. We argue that the findings are consistent with a simple selection mechanism in which entrepreneurs make the non-profit/for-profit decision based on expected project payoffs.