
Abstract
Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo offer
project organizers the ability to market, fund, and build
a community around their campaign. While offering support
and flexibility for organizers, crowdfunding sites provide
very little control to donors. In this paper, we investigate the
idea of empowering donors by allowing them to specify conditions
for their crowdfunding contributions. We introduce
a crowdfunding system, Codo, that allows donors to specify
conditional donations. Codo allow donors to contribute
to a campaign but hold off on their contribution until certain
specific conditions are met (e.g. specific members or groups
contribute a certain amount).
We begin with a micro study to assess several specific conditional
donations based on their comprehensibility and usage
likelihood. Based on this study, we formalize conditional donations
into a general grammar that captures a broad set of
useful conditions. We demonstrate the feasibility of resolving
conditions in our grammar by elegantly transforming conditional
donations into a system of linear inequalities that are efficiently
resolved using off-the-shelf linear program solvers.
Finally, we designed a user-friendly crowdfunding interface
that supports conditional donations for an actual fund raising
campaign and assess the potential of conditional donations
through this campaign. We find preliminary evidence that
roughly 1 in 3 donors make conditional donations and that
conditional donors donate more compared to direct donors.
Materials