Patronage from Crowd: Exploring Drivers of Recurring Crowdfunding Performance

Recurring crowdfunding refers to a fundraising model based on long-term crowd patronage. Recently, it has become a popular tool for creators and small businesses to seek sustainable financial support. Nevertheless, little research has paid attention to the drivers of recurring crowdfunding performance. Drawing from prior literature of reward-based crowdfunding and subscription model, we aim to explore the impact of critical factors related to patrons’ perceived value and campaign design on crowdfunding performance. Based on a unique dataset of 226 recurring crowdfunding campaigns, we have carried out an empirical analysis to test our hypotheses. Our results reflect that creators can improve crowdfunding performance by providing more videos accessible to the membership and setting a funding target. We also find that the membership fee has a negative and significant impact. In addition, our results show that setting membership limits does not bring expected scarcity effect. Our research provides useful managerial insights that help creators make better return from recurring crowdfunding campaigns.