22% of Americans Say They’ve Donated to Crowdfunding Campaigns

Title: “Shared, Collaborative and On Demand: The New Digital Economy”

Organization: The Pew Research Center

Summary: Roughly one in five Americans has given to crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like GoFundMe or Kickstarter.

Donors who have contributed to a larger number of projects are more likely to have given more money to individual projects.

Projects geared toward helping someone in need, like a friend or family member, are the most popular type of campaign, though there are some differences by gender.

Pew drew its data from a survey of more than 4,700 respondents conducted online and by mail in December 2015. Among the findings:

• Twenty-two percent of respondents reported that they had contributed to a crowdfunding campaign. About half of those donors said that $50 was the most they had ever given to an individual fundraising event. Twenty-one percent had given $51 to $100.
• Most crowdfunding donors had given to a handful of projects: About 87 percent said they had contributed to five or fewer projects.
• Crowdfunding campaigns to help someone in need were the most popular. About 68 percent of crowdfunding donors said they’d given to such projects. Women were significantly more likely than men to have contributed to help someone in need.
• Women were slightly more likely than men to donate to a crowdfunding campaign of any kind: About 24 percent of women and 19 percent of men had done this. Men were more likely to give to a higher number of campaigns and make larger contributions.
• Three percent of respondents had created their own crowdfunding campaigns. Seventy-two percent of those campaign creators had also donated to others’ online fundraising campaigns. Women under 50 were twice as likely as men that age to have created their own online fundraising project.
• About 41 percent of respondents said they had heard of crowdfunding sites but had never donated this way; 36 percent had never heard of these sites before.