Funding decisions in green crowdfunding: The interplay between entrepreneurs’ and backers’ characteristics

Green crowdfunding is an emerging field of social entrepreneurship supporting the development of eco-friendly projects. With rising competition, research focuses on factors driving campaign success, mostly relying on secondary database analyses. In a shift from previous research, this study focuses on individual-level analysis and, adopting a twofold perspective, investigates the interplay between entrepreneurs’ and backers’ psychological and demographic characteristics and their effect on funding decisions in donation-based crowdfunding. On the one side, we experimentally manipulated entrepreneurs’ age and gender to analyse their effects on participants’ funding decisions, measured as i) liking; ii) willingness to fund the campaign; iii) amount of money donated. On the other side, we examined how backers’ personality traits, stereotypes, and environmental values impact funding decisions. Results from an online study involving 954 participants showed that age and gender of the entrepreneur did not affect backers’ funding decisions. However, backers’ age, gender, and agreeableness influenced funding behaviour above and beyond individual differences in environmental values. Notably, the results suggested that psychological and environmental dispositions shape evaluative and intentional responses but fail to predict monetary behaviour. These findings offer insights into the green crowdfunding market and highlight the importance of targeting backer profiles to promote sustainable investment decisions