Title: Redistributing Funds across Charitable Crowdfunding Campaigns,
Abstract: On Kickstarter only 36% of crowdfunding campaigns successfully raise
sufficient funds for their projects. In this paper, we explore the possibility
of redistribution of crowdfunding donations to increase the chances of success.
We define several intuitive redistribution policies and, using data from a real
crowdfunding platform, LaunchGood, we assess the potential improvement in
campaign fundraising success rates. We find that an aggressive redistribution
scheme can boost campaign success rates from 37% to 79%, but such
choice-agnostic redistribution schemes come at the cost of disregarding donor
preferences. Taking inspiration from offline giving societies and donor clubs,
we build a case for choice preserving redistribution schemes that strike a
balance between increasing the number of successful campaigns and respecting
giving preference. We find that choice-preserving redistribution can easily
achieve campaign success rates of 48%. Finally, we discuss the implications of
these different redistribution schemes for the various stakeholders in the
crowdfunding ecosystem.