Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Over the past decade, scholarly investigations into reward-based (Zhao & Ryu, 2020) and donation-based (Zhao & Shneor, 2020) crowdfunding have revealed a diversity of sector-specific approaches (Rykkja & Bonet, 2023). The literature recognises these forms as distinct subsets (Wenzlaff, 2020a, p. 441) of non-investment-based crowdfunding practices (i.e., reward and donation-based forms) (Shneor et al., 2020). The identification of these subsets follows the contextual particularities and empirical specificity of the sectors in which crowdfunding is practiced (Demattos Guimarães, 2024). One such subset is cultural crowdfunding, which is defined as the use of non-investment-based crowdfunding for the financing of the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural expressions (Demattos Guimarães & Maehle, 2022; Handke & Dalla Chiesa, 2022; Lazzaro & Noonan, 2020; Rykkja et al., 2020a; Ryu & Kim, 2018; Terui, 2024; Tosatto et al., 2019). Many projects seeking funding align with artistic goods and services from the cultural and creative industries (CCI), characterised by a higher level of symbolic, non-utilitarian value compared to generic outputs (Hirsch, 1972; Jones et al., 2015; Throsby, 2001).
However, despite these sector-specific considerations, most research into non-investment-based crowdfunding examines the criteria and factors that contribute to successful campaign outcomes (Shneor & Vik, 2020). One plausible reason is the widely held assumption that launching a crowdfunding campaign is something good; it is an activity that the fundraiser (the individual responsible for promoting a crowdfunding campaign) aspires to do (Galuszka & Brzozowska, 2017; Junge et al., 2022). While this is often true, it suggests that we lack understanding about whether a fundraiser prefers crowdfunding over other funding methods (Butticè & Ughetto, 2021).
This underlying assumption—that crowdfunding uptake is advantageous—has paved the way for empirical research that focuses on backer behaviour and motivations (Baah-Peprah, 2023; Shneor & Munim, 2019). Conversely, research on the drivers and barriers influencing fundraisers, whether individual- or organisation-led, is relatively scarce (Dalla Chiesa & Dekker, 2021; Rykkja, 2023; Ryu & Kim, 2018), with a few exceptions (D’Amato, 2016; Gerber & Hui, 2013; Gleasure, 2015; Leyshon et al., 2016; Thorley, 2012). This holds true regardless of whether fundraisers as campaign promoters operate within the CCI or in other sectors (Meghouar et al., 2023).
Thus, a starting premise is that there is ample knowledge about factors contributing to successful crowdfunding outcomes (Shneor & Vik, 2020) and a notion of what ‘success’ means in the context of cultural crowdfunding. Previous research acknowledges the limited scope of success or outright failure of cultural crowdfunding campaigns. Regardless of the geographic context, most campaigns raise less than the equivalent of 10,000 USD in local currency (Barbi & Bigelli, 2017; Bonet & Sastre, 2016; De Voldere & Zeqo, 2017; Rykkja, 2023). Some empirical case studies (Cantalapiedra Nieto, 2019; Papadimitriou, 2017; Sheppard, 2017) have found that campaign failures are caused by a lack of information about total costs, professional issues, amateurism, and reliance on emotional marketing.
However, when it comes to the question of inaction, i.e. why a commitment to adopt crowdfunding as a fundraising strategy is abandoned, we know less. One explanation may be that this lack of focus on inaction aligns with a broader agenda in research into cultural policy interventions (Jancovich & Stevenson, 2021) and arts management (Byrnes & Brkić, 2019), of giving ‘what works’ higher prominence in terms of foci.
This implies that in relation to cultural crowdfunding research, little is known about the motivations of individual fundraisers to adopt cultural crowdfunding (Dalla Chiesa, 2021, 2021b; Rykkja, 2023; Ryu & Kim, 2018). Even less is known about how cultural institutions and publicly funded organisations engage with crowdfunding (Riley-Huff et al., 2016).
Therefore, with some exceptions (Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Izzo, 2017; Jelinčić & Šveb, 2021; Marchegiani, 2018; Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024; Papmehl-Dufay & Söderström, 2017; van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023, among others), knowledge about what conditions European museums’ intentions to adopt crowdfunding remains nascent. The aim of this article is to address these gaps by examining the divide between the factors that motivate cultural institutions to adopt cultural crowdfunding and those that result in inaction, ultimately leading to the abandonment of prepared institutional crowdfunding campaigns.
Concretely, the objective of the article is to answer the following interrelated questions:
We organise the article as follows: The next section presents a comprehensive literature review on the factors influencing the adoption of non-investment-based crowdfunding. It also makes a case for considering both sectoral and contextual issues to understand what drives or hinders the adoption of individual and institutional cultural crowdfunding. The Methods section outlines the research design, case selection, data collection, processing, analysis, and the limitations of the study in relation to its validity and reliability. The Findings section presents the results of our investigation. Following that, we discuss the results and presents our theoretical propositions in the Discussion section. Finally, the article concludes with a section that provides an overview of the theoretical and managerial contributions alongside answers to the research questions.
Literature Review
Individual and Institution-Level Drivers and Barriers of Crowdfunding Adoption
Crowdfunding is the use of a digital platform to coordinate the collection of multiple monetary contributions from many people (‘the crowd’) to fund specific projects and ventures (Belleflamme et al., 2014; Mollick, 2014). Non-investment-based forms of donation and reward-based crowdfunding dominate the CCI (De Voldere & Zeqo, 2017), with investment-based forms of crowdfunding gaining little traction (Rykkja, 2023). As a result, the review of drivers and barriers to cultural crowdfunding adoption, at the individual and institutional level, will focus on donation- and reward-based crowdfunding.
Donation-based crowdfunding occurs when contributors give money to a specific project or cause for philanthropic or civic reasons, with no expectation of monetary or material reward (Zhao & Shneor, 2020). Reward-based crowdfunding compensates contributors with a gift, the goods they funded, or an experience (Zhao & Ryu, 2020). In practice, distinguishing between the two is difficult because actual campaigns, for example, those promoted by museums, frequently merge, and combine the models (Marchegiani, 2018; Papmehl-Dufay & Söderström, 2017; Terui & Takahashi, 2022).
Most crowdfunding research focuses on quantitatively predicting which variables contribute to successful campaign outcomes (Shneor & Vik, 2020) or what motivates and drives backers’ intentions to support campaigns (Baah-Peprah, 2023). Other topics, such as the impact of crowdfunding on production practices (Gleasure et al., 2017), the platform’s role (Cicchiello et al., 2022b; Dushnitsky et al., 2016; Rykkja et al., 2020b), and what characterises usage and uptake in specific industries (Dalla Chiesa & Handke, 2020; Tosatto et al., 2019), receive less attention. As a result, the question of how and in what ways fundraisers become motivated to adopt crowdfunding remains largely unexplored in the literature (Rykkja, 2023).
A notable exception to this dearth of studies is a recently published article by Meghouar et al. (2023). The paper provides an empirical study seeking to pinpoint variations in motivations for adopting crowdfunding among micro-entrepreneurs in Morocco. Variations are assessed based on drivers and barriers of individual crowdfunding practice identified via a comprehensive literature review.
Comparing Individual and Institutional Motivations for Crowdfunding Adoption.
While favourable opinions of one or a few individuals act as an initial trigger to contemplate crowdfunding, converting intentions into actions requires broader internal support and external encouragement.
In other words, external incentives, like match funding (Dalla Chiesa & Alexopoulou, 2022; Loots et al., 2023; Rykkja & Bonet, 2023) can motivate cultural institutions to adopt crowdfunding. Furthermore, the expressed or implicit opinions of dominant external stakeholders (i.e., funding bodies, such as an arts council) and a tradition of using sources other than public grants may also trigger intentions to adopt (Rykkja & Bonet, 2023).
From an internal perspective, the motivations of employees of institutions and those of individual fundraisers differ. Individual fundraisers see adoption as a personal journey, potentially well-suited for extroverted personality types willing to learn new skills (e.g., Davidson & Poor, 2015). Conversely, employees of cultural institutions are driven by a sense of responsibility for ensuring a good outcome for their employer and take pride in having crowdfunding as an activity that they can share with their friends and family (Bump, 2014; Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Erb, 2015). Additionally, teamwork and the collective opinion and perceptions of employees significantly influence intentions to adopt and the overall performance of campaigns (Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Cavalcanti Junqueira & Discua Cruz, 2019; Papmehl-Dufay & Söderström, 2017). Receiving adequate support from team members and coworkers is key to achieving this (van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023). It is therefore essential for an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign to combine achievable objectives, valuable projects that appeal to the specific community, effective organisation, extensive outreach endeavours, and consistent contact with the community (Riley-Huff et al., 2016).
Situational circumstances will ultimately moderate the extent of influence, significance, or suitability of these criteria in each situation (Meghouar et al., 2023). Examples of influential factors include gender, age (youth or elderly), educational attainment (undergraduate or postgraduate degree), work experience (managerial or technical), and industry association. Therefore, the study of what drives the intention to adopt cultural crowdfunding at both the individual and institutional levels also needs to consider the specific aspects of the context within which crowdfunding is adopted and practiced. The next part of the review will discuss considerations that should be integrated into the analysis of adoption among cultural institutions.
The Sectoral Contextual Particularities of Adopting Institutional Cultural Crowdfunding
This section makes the case that the perception of crowdfunding and its usefulness goes beyond notions of what is ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ in terms of reaching a campaign fundraising target. Here, it is argued that what drives the intentions to adopt or leads to inaction in terms of launching a campaign can be better understood by considering contextual variables such as geography, industry sector, campaign category, choice of platforms, and so on.
Crowdfunding, as a participatory fundraising strategy, can be perceived as either an opportunity, a threat, a success, or a failure within the context of the public sector—upon which cultural institutions largely depend for funding (Lenart-Gansiniec, 2021; Lenart-Gansiniec & Chen, 2021). Which perception prevails depends on the type of institution, the CCI within which a fundraiser operates, and other contextual issues (Cicchiello et al., 2022a; Dalla Chiesa, 2021; Rykkja, 2023).
Before we discuss perceptions as contextual conditions, it is useful to examine what can be generally defined as the success factors of cultural crowdfunding campaigns and what may lead to either inaction to adopt or failure in terms of outcomes. Previous systematic literature reviews of cultural crowdfunding (Rykkja et al., 2020a; Shneor et al., 2023) have uncovered three sets of variables as indicators of success: aligning the objectives of a campaign with backers’ intrinsic motivations (e.g., participation, recognition, emotional connection, etc.), the capacity to engage prospective or actual backers to share information about the campaign on social networks, and having a professional campaign presentation, both in terms of the quality and quantity of information and media content. In relation to inaction, ‘resistance’ to adopt could be explained by fear of disclosure, visible failure, and of projecting desperation (Gleasure, 2015).
Nonetheless, these findings may not reveal that success is contingent on the capacity to assess and understand the given opportunities provided by a particular context (Rykkja, 2023). The problem stems essentially from an analytical approach that treats fundraisers as if they were a homogeneous cohort (Brent & Lorah, 2019; Handke & Dalla Chiesa, 2022). Ryu and Kim (2018) have developed a taxonomy that challenges this perception of homogeneity. Their starting point is that fundraisers can be differentiated in terms of distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The typology includes four categories of fundraisers: social entrepreneurs, fund seekers, indie producers, and daring dreamers. Four drivers distinguish these: achievement, monetary need, prosocial rewards, and relationship building. For instance, monetary needs drive a fund seeker, whereas prosocial motives drive a social entrepreneur. The daring dreamer values achievement, and the indie producer aims to build relationships with a fan community while raising funding (Ryu & Kim, 2018, p. 363). This analysis plays a crucial role in illustrating how outcomes, beyond entrepreneurial aspirations (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), inspire fundraisers to embrace crowdfunding.
Building on this seminal work, others have studied motivations to adopt crowdfunding by using and advocating for a context-sensitive approach and framework (Rykkja, 2023) that considers differences between production networks and fundraising targets (cf. Dalla Chiesa, 2021a) across the CCI. The framework was based on a longitudinal analysis of nearly 8,000 cultural crowdfunding campaigns in various countries (Nordic countries and Spain). From this emerged a tripartite categorisation that explains three conditions that foment adoption of cultural crowdfunding within a given industry within the CCI: necessity (due to a lack of other funding options), complementarity (as part of diverse funding models), and substitution (reward-based crowdfunding as a replacement for other early-stage finance sources).
According to Rykkja (2023), complementary indicates that motivations to adopt crowdfunding are characterised by dependence on multiple, complex financing structures or the funding of projects that incorporate benefits in the form of cultural and symbolic value for a community. Examples of industries within the CCI that adopt crowdfunding from a complementary rationale are film production, cultural heritage institutions, and GLAM organisations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).
The latter rationale, i.e., community benefits, also indicates an overlap between institutional cultural crowdfunding and civic crowdfunding (Wenzlaff, 2020a). Both varieties of crowdfunding involve campaigns that have a community-orientated profile (Dalla Chiesa, 2021b) and typically cater to or are defined by the specific needs and wants of a defined group of citizens (Davies, 2014). The only, although still significant, difference between these subsets is that cultural crowdfunding projects have a clearly defined artistic profile or cultural dimension (Demattos Guimarães & Maehle, 2022; Handke & Dalla Chiesa, 2022). Conversely, civic crowdfunding has been used to finance the restoration of parks and public space, build playgrounds, raise monuments, or provide urban infrastructure such as walkways and bridges (Wenzlaff, 2020a, 2020b). Therefore, some lessons from the civic crowdfunding literature are highly relevant to institutional cultural crowdfunding as well, because in both cases, institutions with substantial public funding are adopting crowdfunding.
So, besides identifying the funding raised as a complementary source of income for often much larger projects, other factors influencing intentions or inaction relate to how stakeholders perceive institutional cultural crowdfunding. Cultural institutions may abort implementation due to fears that crowdfunding will bring change or disrupt relationships with external stakeholders (Bonet, 2021). In other cases, inaction may at the institutional (i.e., country) level be the result of a systemic lack of knowledge, appreciation, or encouragement from stakeholders (Cicchiello et al., 2022a; Demattos Guimarães, 2024). Therefore, intentions or inactivity may also be explained by lack of legitimacy (Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975) among stakeholders within the CCI (Demattos Guimarães, 2024; Demattos Guimarães & Maehle, 2022).
To summarise, comprehension of the distinctions between crowdfunding models and various factors related to what drives the intentions to launch an initiative (Meghouar et al., 2023) or inaction, such as an aborted campaign launch, are not well understood. In the case of institutional cultural crowdfunding, intention to adopt crowdfunding may result from the divergent perception of participation and citizen involvement in cultural institutions. In some cases, participation is nothing else than a box-ticking exercise to show institutional commitment to trying to engage specific audience demographics, in particular non-users or visitors (Jancovich & Stevenson, 2021). In other cases, opening the institution to participation can be resisted at the organisational or individual level because it breaks with inherent paradigmatic assumptions and beliefs related to artist excellence, professionality, and autonomy (Bonet & Négrier, 2018). This could foment inaction. Crowdfunding, as a commons-based model of funding arts and culture (Dalla Chiesa, 2020), touches on both issues, as there are no guarantees that an institution will see an increase in engagement or participation through crowdfunding (Riley-Huff et al., 2016), nor may the objectives appeal to the staff and internal stakeholders of a cultural institution. Therefore, success is an outcome of matching the intentions of the fundraiser with the external environment of—in our empirical case—a regional museum consortium in Norway.
Methods
Research Design
We use an exploratory single-case study (Flyvbjerg, 2011) with a mixed methods research design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017, p. 116). According to Flyvbjerg (2011), a single case can generate valuable context-dependent knowledge that aligns well with the overall social science plan of creating middle-range theoretical propositions. Second, an exploratory case study makes use of the richness of the data, which makes it perfect for coming up with and developing theoretical propositions inductively (Eisenhardt, 1989).
The purpose of mixed methods research is to combine qualitative and quantitative research or use one methodology to better understand, explain, or expand on the results of the other (Schoonenboom & Johnson, 2017). In our situation, we use mixed methods to better understand and expand the insights that the case study offers. The aim for including a quantitative aspect and approach was to provide moderated insights that better account for the intent or inaction to adopt institutional cultural crowdfunding.
Case Selection
The case examined is a regional Norwegian museum consortium comprising four independent museum units: an Art, Ethnological, Industrial, and a Maritime Museum, alongside a leadership and administration unit. These generic labels help contextualise the activities and exhibitions in each unit. Each unit was tasked by the leadership to generate ideas for potential institutional cultural crowdfunding campaigns, as the initial aim of the case study was to understand factors that lead to crowdfunding intention in cultural institutions. Our role as researchers was to observe the process of developing and planning a campaign. Here, ‘potential’ indicates that while it was hoped the consortium would proceed with the launch of a campaign after preparation, there was no formal commitment to do so.
The museum’s leadership determined that the winning campaign proposal came from the Art Museum unit. The idea was to fund the purchase of technical equipment (e.g., a 3D printer and light boards). With this equipment, the museum would be able to offer qualitatively better workshops to children and young adults. Another rationale for choosing the pitch was that the perceived non-monetary benefits of succeeding with the campaign would be an added incentive to visit the museum and a better cultural offer to the local community. An estimated goal for an ‘all-or-nothing’ reward-based campaign was approximately 10,000 EUR (114,000 Norwegian Kroner), in line with Baeck et al.‘s recommendations (2017). Reaching the goal would have enabled the museum to cover the costs of running the campaign and all the contemplated purchases of equipment and activities.
We chose Norway as the study context because of its distinctive crowdfunding landscape. Due to a long history of substantial public cultural funding (Rykkja & Bonet, 2023) and the general scepticism surrounding private financial support (Mangset et al., 2008), Norway’s cultural sector, like that of other Nordic nations, underutilises crowdfunding and private funding sources.
The scepticism towards private solutions can be demonstrated by the words and actions of Anette Trettebergstuen, the former Minister of Culture and Equality in Norway’s current Labour government (2021–present). During her tenure, she discontinued a matching grant programme designed to encourage private funding for cultural organisations. The programme provided an additional 25% in public challenge grant support for private gifts to arts projects and cultural organisations exceeding 100,000 NOK (approx. EUR 8,000). Her rationale was that the capacity to attract private capital should not influence the allocation of public funds (Regjeringen.no, 2021).
Nevertheless, Norwegian museums do rely on a combination of structural public funding, earned income, and private sources of funding for their operation. Statistics for the period the case study was conducted (Arts and Culture Norway, 2022, p. 10) show that Norwegian museums receive on average only about two-thirds of their income from government funding (equivalent to NOK 2.9 billion out of NOK 4.5 billion, or around €287 million out of €446 million). The remaining third (1.60 billion Norwegian kroner) is divided between earned income (e.g., ticket sales, hire fees), private sponsorships and donations (1.10 billion), and public project grants (0.5 billion).
Concurrently, the Norwegian museum sector has undergone a period of reform and consolidation at both the institutional and organisational levels over the past two decades. In 2000, over 500 museums received government funding from the Ministry of Culture (KUD). Twenty years later, the implementation of a museum reform has rationalised these separate entities into a national network of about 60 administrative museum consortiums (Løkka & Hylland, 2022).
The institutional framework creates a challenging context for fostering the adoption of institutional cultural crowdfunding. On the one hand, stakeholders lack awareness of its value and benefits. This leads to uncertainty and distrust among policymakers. The distrust may explain the Ministry of Culture and Equality’s rationale for discontinuing support for private fundraising by cultural institutions by framing it as illegitimate, because the funding of arts and culture should remain a government responsibility. Consequently, there are few successful examples of how institutional cultural crowdfunding campaigns can be used to generate complementary funding (Rykkja, 2023), enhance museum visibility, or foster community engagement (Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024; Papmehl-Dufay & Söderström, 2017). On the other hand, the economic realities of museum management in Norway are that the adoption of novel financing strategies such as crowdfunding (Prokůpek et al., 2023) is required. Therefore, the case takes place in a context where large institutions are finding it difficult to adjust to a process of mergers and consolidations and in a policy environment where the legitimacy of publicly funded entities resorting to crowdfunding or other forms of private fundraising is uncertain.
Data Collection
Information About Informants.
Descriptive Statistics of the Survey Results.
In addition to the interviews and survey data, we had access to a third source of empirical information. The museum consortium gave a group of master’s students a pitch at the beginning of August 2022, and in about eight weeks (end of September 2022), they converted the idea into a ready-to-launch campaign. The material included a presentation text, suggestions for rewards, contribution tiers, visual elements, budgets, and a proposed timeline for implementation. We had access to the data but only referred to it as an element of the campaign preparation process in the presentation of the findings and the discussion because citing the source would force us to reveal the institution’s identity. However, the quality of the pitch was high. The proposal secured the first prize in an externally evaluated pitching session, competing against other student groups working on similar briefs for other organisations.
Data Processing
The qualitative data was initially collectively analysed through analytical memos (Saldaña, 2013). For each interview, we produced from memory a short synthesis of the conversations, including our impressions and understanding of what we learnt. Thus, unlike field notes and observations, the process required us to dedicate additional time after each interview to reflect on the newly received information. This information served as a form of familiarisation with the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and ideas for codes. These initial codes, in the form of designated sorting labels for text snippets, were thereafter classified to match the higher-order ideas and topics identified as part of the collective memo writing process, which we treated as themes during the second round of processing and review. With ‘themes,’ we thus understand categorised and labelled fragments of narrative that upon assembly provide meaning and understanding of a given issue or topic. During this part of the analysis, we collaborated in the work of naming themes through a process where we sought to “…identify the ‘essence’ of what each theme is about…and determine what aspect of the data each theme captures.” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 93). Finally, we reviewed these themes for consistency with codes before we wrote the qualitative findings using the thematic labels while classifying and organising the text into coherent narratives to guide our subsequent theorizing. In many ways, our approach is similar to Pan and Tan’s (2011) description of how to organise and reduce qualitative data based on a set of interconnected factors into themes.
Data Analysis
For the qualitative analysis, we collected qualitative data from staff members who were either in leadership roles or involved in preparing and managing exhibitions. As a result, their views may not be representative of the opinions of other categories of employees. Therefore, we decided to opt for triangulation. We accomplished this by gathering additional data through distributing a questionnaire (survey) to every employee in the museum consortium. In essence, our objective, in terms of mixed methods designs, was to integrate results from the various methods used to collect and analyse data (Bryman, 2007).
Usually, the ‘how-to’ of integrating within a mixed methods study design needs to consider when and why integration should occur. In relation to the latter question, our rationale was, as previously explained, to add validity to our findings. While opinions diverge about when and how to achieve effective integration (Bryman, 2007) in relation to the former issue, we follow the pragmatic suggestions by Tashakkori and Teddlie (2009) that bringing together findings from different methods, as in ‘mixing’, may take place during any stage of an investigation (i.e., conceptual, methodology, analysis, and interference).
The purpose of conducting and analysing the results of a survey was to establish whether there were significant differences in opinions among categories of staff. Since we used four different collectors for the distribution, we would be able to segment the staff according to their roles. The four categories were leadership, defined as leaders of the various museum units and the administrative staff working for the consortium; curators, who refer to staff in charge of producing exhibitions and their mediation to visitors and audiences; technical staff, who were skilled workers operating machinery or in charge of building management and maintenance; and finally support staff, who were in charge of ticket sales, museum stores, cleaning, and serving food and drinks to visitors.
As the sample was small (
Limitations
There are evident limits to the generalisability of a single case study on the intentions of a Norwegian museum consortium to adopt institutional cultural crowdfunding. The Norwegian reality, characterised by access to generous public funding, differs from the realities faced by museums adopting institutional cultural crowdfunding in Brazil (Dalla Chiesa, 2021b) or Japan (Pan, 2021). However, we believe several good reasons justify its worth. First, this is an exploratory study that aims to identify drivers and barriers of crowdfunding adoption among cultural institutions in Europe, of which the Nordic countries are a part. While the findings and discussions are by necessity tied to the specificity of the context, some may well have what Flyvbjerg (2011, p. 305) refers to as transferability: their usefulness as propositions for further empirical testing independent of context. Second, recent contributions on the topic of crowdfunding and museums suggest that further studies of employee viewpoints to uncover motivations for adoption and best practices (Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024) are needed. Accordingly, this is what this study does by using semi-structured interviews and surveys. Third, the study fits into broader calls post-COVID-19 to study the adoption of digital fundraising techniques by European museums (Prokůpek et al., 2023). Finally, the study contrasts the numerous empirical studies of crowdfunding in museums based in the USA or the UK (Baeck et al., 2017; Bump, 2014; Bushong et al., 2018; Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Erb, 2015; Riley-Huff et al., 2016), where access to public funding is less generous, and hence the intention to adopt crowdfunding is stronger. In that sense, it contributes findings that may help pave the way for future European cross-country comparative studies of institutional cultural crowdfunding in the context of museums and cultural heritage (Jelinčić & Šveb, 2021; Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024).
Analysis of the Results
Our analysis identified seven themes that describe the factors and conditions that foster intention or lead to inaction in terms of adopting institutional cultural crowdfunding. In the following, we introduce them by defining each of them and giving example citations from interviews to support their presence.
First, we have previous knowledge of crowdfunding, which refers to the familiarity with crowdfunding as a fundraising mechanism from a practical or intellectual level. Our findings show that the distribution of knowledge differed widely between individual employees and units. The impression was that several staff members were either uncertain of what crowdfunding was or unaware of potential benefits or drawbacks of crowdfunding. This was mostly due to a lack of knowledge about what crowdfunding is and how the funding mechanism works. As an example, informant 9 had working knowledge of how to fundraise resources to carry out projects but did not know how to do this via a crowdfunding campaign. While informant 3 described personal knowledge of crowdfunding as “not much,” informant 4 was not even sure what crowdfunding was: “…crowdfunding, I had never heard that word before, I didn’t know anything about it. When I was told it was like “…we needed money to move an old medical building from the city centre to the museum site…we have a shortfall of about 50,000 Norwegian kroners we needed to fund the project. Since the building was part of an old hospital, one of the persons in the group working with that project came up with the idea of sending ‘letters of infection’ saying that you had to pay 50 Norwegian kroners to become cured from the disease…and send names to the newspaper of five people. They would be listed in the newspaper as infected, and to get stricken off the list, they would have pay…we got the money.”
The second theme was crowdfunding as a vehicle for discussing funding challenges. Informant 1, who had experience with backing campaigns and knowledge about how to use institutional cultural crowdfunding as a fundraising mechanism, provided some reflexive thoughts highlighting how institutional cultural crowdfunding can be an outlet to “…explain our financial needs, that we are not fully funded…a crowdfunding campaign can help us communicate and explain these issues and debunk myths about who we are.” However, discussing the needs is a careful balancing act because, “…we are so heavily funded by the government, this idea of asking for money from people can be negatively viewed; it has a negative association to it.” This observation also aligns with the views of informant 7, who does not necessarily agree that institutional use of crowdfunding opens “…a revolving door that facilitates open discussion about the museum consortium’s funding challenges…,” as it depends on what audiences and local communities know about crowdfunding. As informant 9 concurs, if they are not familiar with crowdfunding, they may question, “…the need for a publicly funded art museum to resort to using crowdfunding…” to fund the purchase of their own technical equipment.
A third theme is the value of complementary non-monetary benefits. For an institution like a museum consortium with 40 full- and part-time employees, the money raised, according to informant 1, is potentially “… just a complementary injection of initial funding.”, effectively just “… (part of) the costs of a much larger project for the museum…,” according to informant 6. The important complementary value of institutional cultural crowdfunding is the way it can be used for audience engagement or educational purposes via two-way interaction between the institution and backers. In other words, the community’s participation has a knock-on effect in the form of positive societal contributions because it is perceived as relevant for the local community. This is what informant 1 describes when arguing that an increase in community engagement is more valuable than the money collected through crowdfunding “……you are not asking them (the crowd) for money; you are offering them ownership in something...it is (achieving) that mental shift in perception from begging for money to being included in something. It’s about allowing people to participate, to contribute to something.”
Leadership and management of the selection and campaign implementation process emerges as a fourth theme. According to informants 2 and 3, the leadership of the consortium solicited project ideas for a possible crowdfunding campaign from the individual museum units. The guidelines and requirements for the proposals stipulated that they should be small enough to be managed by the staff within the same unit. In other words, the process of formulating campaign ideas and proposals was devolved. Creative workshops and collective reflection, as informant 9 would have liked to see happening, did not take place. Informants 2 and 3 felt that the process of managing the implementation was hands-off, as campaign ideas were requested without any ‘prior preparation’ on the requirements and criteria to be considered. This was also reflected when their campaign ideas were presented to us. It became clear that some of the submitted pitches were improvised ideas and linked to immediate needs. An example of these proposals was the idea of funding the costs of buying tables for a museum unit’s visitor centre. The project idea offered few benefits and perks that would convince the community or other backers to support the campaign. In addition, it was a project the museum would typically be expected to fund via regular budgets. When it came to selecting a campaign idea, informants 6, 7, and 8 in a group interview noted that it felt like “…the leadership had an instrumental approach…”, meaning that the outcome was partly decided in advance because they wanted a certain type of project with community participation as a core objective of both the project and the campaign rewards. One of the informants (1) who participated in deciding which of the proposals should go forward was clear that the campaign should “… be a reason for us to think (and do) something new”, while aiming to “… strengthen (our) mediating and educational activities.” In addition, the campaign should strive to offer innovative rewards. “Putting a name on a plaque… it’s lazy and not very innovative… We need to gain ownership, to get people to physically be there, to do something.”
The fifth topic is collaboration with external experts. Just as the leadership left individual units to conceive and pitch their own campaign ideas without extensive guidance or guidelines to follow, there was no evidence of extensive interactions between the group of students and the art museum employees tasked with launching and managing the campaign. Some of the non-interaction was due to misunderstandings. According to the art museum’s informants (6, 7, and 8), they were unaware of the expectation to either provide the students with information or participate, ideally in person, in the presentation session of the student groups’ campaign pitches to a jury of experts. Informant 7, upon receiving the invitation to attend, responded as follows: “…I have not heard about that; no one has told me anything… So, you said on the 29th? I didn’t know; I’ll make a note of that… Please send me the programme if you have any information.” In the end, the decision to abort the launch of the campaign was explained by a “…lack of communication with the students…” according to informant 7. This lack of interaction had resulted in the students giving too little attention to the dimensions of artist excellence and professional qualities. The workshops were events the museum used to connect audiences with the works, tools, and techniques of the exhibiting professional artists. The elaborated campaign pitch made no references to these objectives.
The next topic was internal collaboration between people and units. According to informant 8, creating a temporary project team with distributed managerial responsibilities to deliver the campaign was the prerogative of informant 1. However, the informants diverged in opinions on whether such arrangements would be possible to implement. Informant 1’s view was that putting together a team with members from different units would be challenging because of “…a lack of tradition and experience with this form of organising work.” Nonetheless, other informants reported that individual employees across different units (informants 5 and 8) had managed to find informal ways of working together and helping each other out with day-to-day activities. These relations were, however, of a more practical nature and were not connections with whom one would share ideas or discuss the promotion of a crowdfunding campaign. Other informants expressed that they would welcome collaborative project work across units. Informants 2 and 3 were positive that most of their colleagues would be predisposed to take part in the promotion of a crowdfunding campaign promoted by another unit within the consortium.
Finally, the last and seventh theme was the precedence of routine tasks over one-off initiatives. The interpretation of the interviews does point to an overwhelming consensus among all informants that working on a crowdfunding campaign is not an activity or project they consider to be of importance in their day-to-day working situation. According to Informant 1, there is an imbalance in which the list of tasks and demands imposed by funders and owners is much longer than what the employees can manage to cover. These circumstances force the staff to make ‘hard priorities’ in relation to how to allocate working hours on different activities. This explains why Informants 6–8 said that the crowdfunding campaign was just one of many current and potential future projects (e.g., exhibitions, building maintenance, digitising collections, etc.,) that the consortium and units were working on at any given time and not necessarily the one with the highest priority and time allocated to it. Therefore, for the implementation of a crowdfunding campaign, the decision to launch would depend on the ‘overall resource situation’ (i.e., available working hours), according to informant 6. Informant 1 was clear that the promotion of an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign would be aborted if the total costs measured in working hours and other expenditure could endanger the execution of other ongoing projects. What may be priorities in terms of routine work or important one-off projects is highly individual, context-dependent, and driven by the knowledge and interests of individual employees. Some, like informants 4 and 5, were convinced that the staff would not be interested in working pro bono hours to organise a campaign for the museum. Nonetheless, as informant 6 succinctly commented, it may also come down to knowledge of and interest in the activity: “…crowdfunding is something that feels far removed from our core activities. It’s not even part of our vocabulary as professional museum employees. Understanding the potential benefits is beyond our comprehension…it’s so new that we haven’t figured out what to do with it. If this project would teach us how to write the perfect, infallible funding application, we would have all been there taking part, because we know that it is a skill we need to be able to master in our work.”
To check for any moderating conditions, the analysis of the survey data complements the findings of the interview data analysis.
As explained in Section 3.5, the objective of conducting a survey was to determine whether other categories of staff besides those we interviewed held different opinions about institutional cultural crowdfunding. The survey, which was conducted using an online platform (SurveyXact) and four individual collectors, allowed us to collect data from employees based on one of four roles. These were museum leadership, curator staff (in charge of exhibition production and mediation), technical staff, and support staff. We only interviewed employees from the leadership and curatorial staff categories. The purpose was to determine if these two or other staff categories had differing opinions that could moderate some of the qualitative study’s findings.
Pairwise Comparison of Staff Categories.
a. Significance is denoted by † (
b. Significance values have been adjusted by the Bonferroni correction for multiple tests.
Finally, answers to the question, “Are you willing to spend part of your working time (instead of carrying out other tasks or duties) to help the museum with preparing and launching a crowdfunding campaign?” showed no significant differences between staff categories; neither did pairwise comparisons when dividing the categories of staff into two groups comprising those with or without experience with crowdfunding (cf. Table 3).
Discussion
The article’s objective was to investigate the factors that prevent cultural institutions from embracing crowdfunding as a fundraising tool. To identify these factors, we conducted a single mixed methods case study of a Norwegian cultural institution (museum). The choice of country and setting creates an interesting empirical setting. On the one hand, governments at various levels provide few incentives to encourage the adoption of institutional cultural crowdfunding. Museum consortiums, on the other hand, have access to generous structural public funding, but statistics show that the same institutions must also raise their own income and seek funding from public and private sources to balance revenue and expenses. This vacuum, as we will discuss, reveals intriguing findings that may explain the motivations that drive intentions or lead to inaction relative to adopting institutional cultural crowdfunding.
Factors that Condition the Adoption or Abortion of Institutional Crowdfunding Initiatives.
Funding and Non-Monetary Benefits
While the crowdfunding literature clearly demonstrates that an initial investment in the short term can generate additional economic, social, and symbolic value in the long term for a cultural institution (Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Dalla Chiesa, 2021b; Marchegiani, 2018; Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024; Riley-Huff et al., 2016; van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023), it is difficult to realise the potential when one lacks knowledge or skills to prepare and launch an institutional crowdfunding campaign.
The interview data indicate that the intraorganisational knowledge about fundraising in general and crowdfunding in particular is both tacit—meaning personal as opposed to explicitly codified and shared—and unequally distributed between members of staff and museum units. An explanation is that the curator staff group is the one that has been the most active contributor to crowdfunding campaigns over the last year, in addition to a group where all respondents indicate that they have previous experience of involvement in fundraising efforts for cultural projects that, in whole or in part, have relied on the use of crowdfunding. This exemplifies how some employees possess a clear understanding of the potential value and benefits that extend beyond fundraising (Frydrych et al., 2014).
However, when weighing the potential costs and rewards of institutional cultural crowdfunding, it is important to evaluate both the immediate and long term. In a situation like the one we examined, the staff tended to focus on the near term. This is because, from an internal resource standpoint, the institution’s understaffing and resource constraints inhibit the prioritisation of novel activities and innovative tasks beyond what is required to sustain museum units and exhibitions. Agendas appear predetermined, with results tightly pre-defined and left within the bounds of what could be viewed as ‘feasible.’ It appears that the workforce is continually making difficult decisions about how to spend their working hours.
Additionally, self-efficacy—reflected in the knowledge and understanding of the benefits and the sense of having required skills to prepare and launch a crowdfunding campaign—was unevenly distributed among staff (Ajzen, 2002). As suggested by Informant 1, this implies that the consortium overall possesses the necessary knowledge, skills, and competence to manage an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign, but the distribution of this knowledge is not efficient enough to optimise the implementation process. In other words, skills and knowledge are not necessarily found amongst the staff within a unit where they may be required but can be found among employees in other units within the consortium.
Thus, for many, the launch of an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign became just another of the many ongoing, simultaneous projects they had to deal with in their day-to-day work. Actions needed to implement the campaign both increased the overall strain and required additional multitasking for employees. Since it is very much up to the individual staff members to decide whether they should be working on the implementation of a crowdfunding campaign project or allocate their time to other tasks and activities, the chances that a crowdfunding project will not be prioritised are high.
The result was that the staff at the Art Museum did not have enough time commitment to understand the nature of the crowdfunding campaign project, the pitch preparation procedure, or the benefits such an initiative may provide for the institution. Another explanation for the inaction and postponement of the campaign is that the Art Museum’s unit had to prioritise hiring new employees after two of the informants’ moved positions during the campaign pitch development.
Thus, why the possibility to access funding and other non-monetary benefits (Handke & Dalla Chiesa, 2022; van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023) is not acted upon could be explained by a lack of resources in the form of working hours, money, skills, and knowledge of crowdfunding. This is regardless of whether the employees find the work fascinating and meaningful on a personal level or believe it is important to the museum in a longer-term perspective. Based on these reflections, we propose the following: P1. If employees lack direction, guidance, or support, then routine tasks will take precedence over one-off projects such as a crowdfunding campaign.
Legitimacy
The literature defines institutional cultural crowdfunding as a method of raising funds that an institution can employ to fund larger projects (Marchegiani, 2018). It also functions as a tool for communicating about financial requirements and obstacles (Baeck et al., 2017). Some of the informants and employees had internalised these attitudes (Ajzen, 1991), and they shared this understanding and belief in the potential of institutional cultural crowdfunding. However, analysing the interview and survey data yields a more nuanced perspective. Individuals who are unfamiliar with crowdfunding may claim that the municipality, as the owner, should cover these costs through public grants or subsidies. Thus, there exists a link between funding concerns, the concept of perceived benefits (cf. van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023), attitudes (Ajzen, 1991), and perceived legitimacy (Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Scott, 2008). This is particularly the case under circumstances of uncertainty as to whether it would be appropriate and legitimate to appropriate institutional cultural crowdfunding as a funding source. Our research found these attitudes and beliefs among informants across the units of the museum consortium, partly as the result of a lack of capacity to absorb and take on board new ideas.
Any organisation that wants to make use of its employees’ tacit knowledge base requires leadership and management to be able to organise work into temporary intraorganisational teams to make the most of the process (Suddaby et al., 2017). The data indicates that the most effective method for organizing and implementing the campaign would have been to delegate leadership to an intraorganisational temporary project manager, who would then be responsible for preparing and launching the campaign with an intraorganisational team of employees with relevant and required skills. If the leadership had taken this decision, it would have given the process of adoption and implementations legitimacy through moral and cultural support (Scott, 2008, p. 51).
In addition to providing much-needed reassurance and internal legitimacy, such a managerial decision would have made it possible to draw upon the dispersed and uncodified tacit knowledge of all the consortium employees (Ribeiro, 2013) rather than that of just the staff within one unit. Our case analysis revealed that one of the informants, who worked for a different unit (the Industrial Museum) from the one preparing the crowdfunding campaign (the Art Museum), possessed extensive practical experience with community-based fundraising and was in the possession of experience and standing in the community to convince internal and external stakeholders of the merits and legitimacy of launching an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign. The crowdfunding project could have been framed by the leadership as a form of internal isomorphism, treating the cultural crowdfunding campaign as a mimetic adaptation (cf. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2008) of the museum’s earlier fundraising efforts to relocate a medical building., as discussed by informant 5. As a result, we suggest the following proposal: P2a. The perceived value and benefits of institutional cultural crowdfunding are unevenly distributed across staff categories within cultural institutions. P2b. The legitimacy of using institutional cultural crowdfunding is questioned in contexts where it could be seen as asking the public to pay again for services already funded through taxes.
Leadership and Management
Implementing a non-routine activity or project, such as an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign, demands the leadership’s attention. However, the informants stated that the execution and planning processes were hands-off. In addition, there were no plans to set up an intraorganisational task force. This would have involved a process of negotiating the transfer of people and use of allocated resources across units. Finally, the inadequate management of a crowdfunding campaign’s adoption and implementation led to its failure, owing mostly to a lack of knowledge about how to arrange such a campaign effectively. One possible explanation could be derived from upper-echelon theory, whose premise is that the background and experience of the top management team (TMT) predicates organisational performance and outcomes (Hambrick, 2007). The imbalance in the TMT meant that none of the managers with experience in how to fundraise using crowdfunding had direct responsibility for the planning, implementation, and execution of the campaign. Instead, it was left to informants 6–8, who had little knowledge, no previous experience, and substantial discretion (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1990) in deciding as to whether the campaign would be greenlit and go forward. The interviews revealed that one of the most plausible factors explaining the aborted launch was the difficulties in integrating the Art Museum’s values with the student’s efforts to create a marketing pitch. The lack of external collaboration, with students acting as ‘expert consultants’ based on their chosen field of study, may have contributed to the campaign’s eventual failure. When considering implementing a new project or procedure, such as a crowdfunding campaign, the trade-off is whether to risk scarce resources (money or people) by making time for innovation or to stick to routine and the most pressing issues to avoid spreading oneself too thin. This has consequences for implementing process innovation in the form of new managerial models and approaches to structuring employee work performance. Based on these arguments, we advance the following propositions: P3. Successfully implementing institutional cultural crowdfunding as an innovation requires management attuned to varying perceptions and knowledge of crowdfunding as a fundraising tool. P4. Managing the launch and execution of an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign will require extensive intraorganisational collaboration between people and units to succeed. P5. Developing an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign requires extensive inter organisational collaboration.
Conclusions
The article investigated the reasons why cultural institutions may fail to adopt crowdfunding as a fundraising strategy, the factors that influence the decision to launch a planned campaign initiative (intentions to adopt), and the factors that lead to campaign plans being abandoned. Our interrelated research questions were:
Returning to the question of why cultural organisations fail to adopt institutional cultural crowdfunding and what are the factors that lead to inaction in implementation, our answer is that if the cultural organisation operates in an external environment characterised by a lack of knowledge of cultural crowdfunding, then shifting from intention to launch requires leadership and management of the process, which may reconcile any internal differences of opinion about the merits of cultural crowdfunding. Failure to overcome these challenges results in the opposite outcome: a shift from intention to inaction. Thus, the key is to strategically plan, implement, and launch a crowdfunding campaign that the leadership can successfully rally their employees behind.
From a theoretical perspective, there is an emerging, empirically informed civic (Brent & Lorah, 2019; Wenzlaff, 2020b), public (de la Pallière et al., 2024), and institutional cultural crowdfunding (Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021; Marchegiani, 2018; Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2024; van Teunenbroek & Smits, 2023) literature showing how crowdfunding can be adopted by civic, cultural, or public institutions to counter what Hong and Ryu (2019) refer to as ‘financial distress.’ However, adoption and use are context sensitive and dependable. Our contribution shows that in situations where cultural crowdfunding is not part of an institution’s vocabulary, intentions to adopt can be hampered by knowledge gaps and insufficient legitimacy. As the quote from Information 6 shows, if crowdfunding campaign planning was replaced by a training course in how to write a successful application for public grant funding, the staff would easily understand the potential values and benefits of the activity. Therefore, sustaining intention to adopt requires leadership that dares to challenge questions about the legitimacy and worth of launching an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign. There should be an ongoing project to educate people about institutional cultural crowdfunding (Wenzlaff, 2020a), to rally the public behind it through matching grants (Dalla Chiesa & Alexopoulou, 2022; Loots et al., 2023; Rykkja & Bonet, 2023), and to provide employees with the kind of leadership and shared management environment that encourages them to try new things and fail (Döös & Wilhelmson, 2021; Rosing & Zacher, 2023) that this quote and informants’ opinions indicate.
These insights are in no way unique to the context of individual or institutional cultural crowdfunding. As discussed in Chapter 2, the same barriers or drivers may be present in other contexts where institutions with substantial public funding seek to adopt crowdfunding for civic purposes and community benefits (Davies, 2014; Wenzlaff, 2020a). The relationship stems from the similarities, or overlap, between the civic and cultural approach to crowdfunding in that the purpose is the funding since the types of campaigns are for public goods whose consumption is non-rivalrous (Rykkja & Bonet, 2023).
To advance a research agenda on institutional crowdfunding through cultural, civic, or public empirical lenses, we propose focusing on three key areas. First, it is essential to identify and explain the drivers of institutional, rather than individual, adoption. We should refine potential adoption drivers by deepening our understanding of adoption barriers. Finally, core concepts from various independent theories should be integrated into a unified framework that more effectively captures mindsets than any single theory in isolation. For example, this could involve merging concepts from self-efficacy, attitudes, institutional theory, and upper echelon theory (Ajzen, 1991, 2002; Hambrick, 2007; Scott, 2008).
In terms of managerial contributions, the case study demonstrates the challenges that cultural organisations face when attempting to adopt crowdfunding because it is a process innovation that, in many cases, is novel for the institution due to cultural crowdfunding’s low adoption in a European context (Rykkja & Bonet, 2023). This is where the main administrative unit of the organisation—the consortium’s leadership in our case—must conduct preliminary work on assessing the staff’s skill base before beginning the adoption process. In some ways, we found the situational description of the Norwegian national museum sector to be reasonably accurate when compared to the actual circumstances of the museum consortium we investigated. We can compare the regional merger of individual museum units into a consolidated consortium between 2007 and 2017 to an attempt at a “cold fusion” of very different organisational units, particularly in terms of organisational trajectory, internal culture, and interactions and relationships with communities and stakeholders. These conditions made it difficult to foster synergies and collaborations among museum units while also establishing an intraorganisational culture. By focusing on these issues, the implementation of an institutional cultural crowdfunding campaign will gain in efficiency and prevent initiatives from failing before they launch.
These concluding remarks seek to remind us that there is still much work needed to be done to better understand the factors and conditions that convert crowdfunding intentions into successful adoption and implementation by either cultural institutions, civic society associations, or local or regional authorities. Our propositions highlight a need for guidance, explanation of value and benefits, legitimation, and sensitive leadership, along with extensive intra- and interorganisational collaboration to achieve the transition. In addition, the specificity of the institutional and geographical context that fosters the adoption of institutional cultural crowdfunding needs consideration to avoid inaction and abortive attempts. We hope that this study may provide some insights that can be useful to further our understanding of what drives intention or leads to inaction in relation to the implementation of institutional forms of civic, cultural, and public crowdfunding in Europe or beyond.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iD
