Crowdfunding as a tool to increase stakeholder involvement : From a financial mechanism for start-ups to a multifunctional tool for any company

Abstract: During the last years, the financial mechanism of crowdfunding has gone through remarkable changes. Crowdfunding has developed from being a mostly donation-based concept mainly used for artistic and creative purposes, into a serious way of financing profit oriented start-up ventures. Besides being used to raise money, several non-financial motivations for crowdfunding were identified by researchers, many of these connected to the idea of stakeholder involvement. In times of an increased demand for organizations to take on a social responsibility, the non-financial motivations are highly attractive for other organisations than only start-up companies. Therefore, the case of the Swedish multinational utility provider Vattenfall was chosen to study their pilot project of crowdfunding a renewable energy project in the Netherlands. In the study, non-financial crowdfunding motivations were examined and connected to different levels of stakeholder involvement. The results showed that Vattenfall was well aware of the fact that crowdfunding can be used as a tool to increase stakeholder involvement. More specifically, we found that crowdfunding within Vattenfall is mainly being used as a tool to engage on lower and middle levels. Drawing from these findings, we propose that crowdfunding can be seen as a multifunctional tool for financial and stakeholder involvement reasons.