Kickstarter project creators’ communities : building online supportive networks along the crowdfunding journey

• Autor(a) principal: Jardinier, Marion Alice Juliette
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29291
• topic: Kickstarter; Crowdfunding; Online communities; Support; Netnography; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The present dissertation uses the netnography technique to understand the dynamics at place within an online community dedicated to Kickstarter project launchers. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform launched in 2009 with the mission of helping bring creative projects come to life, throu gh an innovative model of online fundraising. Ten years later, Kickstarter is the leading crowdfunding platform in the world, and it hosts various kinds of projects. Project creators use the platform to raise funding and awareness for their projects. Analy zing interactions within a closed community of project creators allowed to understand the daily work and struggles project creators go through, and the importance for them to share these moments with other project creators online. Insights from the netnogr aphic observation permit to draw a framework of what creators expect and obtain from participating in such community: technical support, emotional support, and social support. These findings add up to the current academic research on crowdfunding, which un til then considered the importance of community only through the relationship uniting single project creators to their backers but did not investigate the cross project relationship existing between creators. Moreover, the results of the analysis enable to draw managerial recommendations for Kickstarter and crowdfunding platforms in general to improve their service towards more cross project interaction and support for project creators.