From Idea to Impact: Exploring the Development of Social Enterprises During the Crowd-funding Process

Crowdfunding for sustainable and social enterprises has gained increasingly scholarly interest since 2013 (Böckel, Hörisch, & Tenner, 2021; Hussain, Di Pietro, & Rosati, 2023). Researchers have studied the factors that impact the success of a crowdfunding campaign. Still, little is known about how crowdfunding affects the organizational dynamics of nascent social enter-prises. The way in which crowdfunding can accelerate organizational communication and force nascent social enterprises to clarify their social mission, describe the social problem they are addressing, and speak in the name of their beneficiaries, values, and further figures has not yet been studied. To answer the research question of how social enterprises evolve during a crowdfunding cam-paign, the study will use a ventriloquial analysis of communicative elements in online commu-nication and interviews. This will help explore the dynamic of unfolding social entrepreneurial communication. The study aims to contribute to the social entrepreneurship literature by shed-ding light on how nascent social enterprises act under the pressure of fast and frequent public communication and how their organizational structures evolve. Additionally, the study will question the assumption that crowdfunding provides nascent social enterprises with sufficient start-up funding and identify the non-financial benefits of crowd-funding. It will also explore the interplay between public and private communication, the active role of platforms, and algorithms as other-than-human actors. The study will contribute to the theoretical and methodological discussion by introducing the Montreal School in Communica-tive Constitution of Organization (CCO) and ventriloquial analysis to social entrepreneurship research.