The work performed in the first reporting period encompasses the finalisation and implementation of the first RCT. The Action began with an intensive design finalisation phase with scientific partners at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and RCT consultants from Innovation Growth Lab by Nesta. in which the research design was finalised and translated into an actionable plan. In short, the final research design is a randomized, three-arm messaging trial testing whether the presence of public funding for a social innovation project has an effect on an individual’s likelihood to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign for that project. The RCT takes place within a large email sendout introducing rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns from social innovation projects funded in the Social Crowdfunding strand of Impact Innovation. The sample comprised approximately 22.000 email recipients.The intervention was one of two small additional texts - seed funding and challenge match funding - in the email detailing the nature of the FFG funding for the social innovation project in addition to information about the crowdfunding campaigns. The control group received no information regarding FFG funding of the projects. The final outcome variables measured are click-rates of links in the email and conversation rates.
Once the design was finalised, we transitioned into the actual implementation of the first RCT. First results indicate that there is no significant difference in an individual’s interest in social innovation crowdfunding campaigns when FFG funding is mentioned or not. Generally, there was overall high interest in the campaigns. No robust results could be derived from the first RCT due to issues with data collection, however, thus a second RCT will be conducted in the 2nd reporting period to determine causal links. The main results from the second RCT show that, overall, financial support from the FFG – in particular seed funding - has positive effects for the CF Campaigns of social innovation projects, however the positive effects are differentiated by gender. When it came to measuring the demonstrated interest, females in seed funding demonstrated significantly more interest than females in the other two groups, whereas there was no statistically significant difference among men in different treatment groups. Furthermore, there is evidence that indicating financial support from the FFG positively affected an individual’s perception of campaign success and project success, although the gender component also played a role here. Specifically, females in the seed group perceived the social innovation projects to be much more likely to succeed in meeting their project goals compared to females in the other two treatment groups and males in the seed group. On the other hand, males in the challenge match funding group perceived the CF campaigns to be more likely to succeed in meeting their campaign targets.
Communication and dissemination activities were targeted at different stakeholders, namely innovation agencies, innovation policy makers, evaluators and researchers, cross-sector activites, and the crowdfunding community. Innovation agencies were generally adressed by having presentations in the FFG and in the TAFTIE Task Force Experiment! as well as creating a new internal process in the FFG for experimentation and RCTs. In addition, innovation policy makers were informed by conducting a workshop and presentation, reaching out to program managers at the FFG and the advisory committee of the General Programmes. Evaluators and researchers could be reached by attending conferences (CODE@MIT, WISE 2021) and a submitted paper to Management Science by our scientific partners UMN as well as a cooperation with the Vienna University of Economics and Business for a master thesis. Furthermore, cross-sector activities encompassed a panel session at the EU industry weeks 2021 and the presentation at the Social Entrepreneurship Network Austria. Finally, we informed the crowdfunding community by giving a presentation to Startnext, our partnering crowdfunding platform, and the FFG submitted a case study to Eurocrowd.
