Identification of Determinants of Using Crowdfunding as a Source of Financing the Development of Social Enterprises–the Perspective of Polish Social Entrepreneurs

Social enterprises face funding challenges caused, among other things, by investors focusing too much on risk and return. As traditional capital markets do not meet the needs of social entrepreneurs, crowdfunding can be an alternative way to raise funds for the development of their business. In this context, crowdfunding has not been sufficiently researched, and its growing importance in business finance makes it worth understanding its impact on social enterprises. Therefore, this paper helps to fill this gap in the literature by analysing social entrepreneurs’ use of alternative forms of finance such as crowdfunding. The observation of social enterprise activities in Poland, which has been carried out systematically for several years, justifies the thesis that this phenomenon as a practical activity is relatively new and research is fragmentary and rather than in-depth. Hence the idea to address this very issue in this paper. Therefore, our study collects qualitative data from 21 social entrepreneurs to find out the reasons that facilitate or hinder its use by social enterprises.