A social recommendation approach for reward-based crowdfunding campaigns

In recent years, a new kind of fundraising mode known as crowdfunding has gradually emerged. Because of the rapid spread of the internet, people can offer their creative ideas on a fundraising platform and attract mass backers to invest in their projects. Crowdfunding not only helps users to realize their dreams but also allows companies to carry out test marketing. Although crowdfunding brings huge opportunities, the success rate of fundraising plans remains low. In this study, we therefore propose a phase-based backer recommendation mechanism, which integrates information from crowdfunding and social networking platforms by analyzing the factors of social relationships, user preferences, and economic backgrounds, to help project creators to reach their fundraising goals at each stage. Our experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is effective in identifying appropriate backers with respect to the status of the project and significantly improves the success rates of crowdfunding. The proposed mechanism can provide greater business value and more opportunities to crowdfunding platforms and contribute to more successful fundraising plans.