Who Gets Started on Kickstarter? Demographic Variations in Fundraising Success

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter are expected to “democratize” funding by increasing the availability of capital to traditionally underrepresented groups, but there is conflicting evidence about racial disparities in success rates. This paper contributes to the information systems literature on crowdfunding by examining the racial dynamics in the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The race of subjects in project and user photos are determined with facial recognition software for 138,778 fundraising projects, and matched sample techniques are used to control for observable differences in project categories among racial groups. Even controlling for these observable differences, this study finds that projects with African-American photo subjects achieve lower success rates. African-American fundraisers also achieve significantly lower success than other groups, and this effect is larger than the effect from project photos. This study has practical implications for individuals seeking capital in these markets as well as design implications for the platforms themselves.