Effects of public–private partnerships on civic crowdfunding in Japan: empirical evidence on heterogeneous fundraising factors

Civic crowdfunding is attracting attention as a new fundraising method for local governments to supplement their financial resources, and is a promising means of promoting social innovation through cross-sectoral collaboration. This study provides quantitative evidence regarding factors that facilitate fundraising in local government-led civic crowdfunding campaigns and the mitigation of potential problems associated with private sector involvement, significantly expanding the literature on civic crowdfunding. Using Multiple regression analysis, we found that variables such as target fundraising amount, duration, and project updates significantly influence fundraising, which is consistent with previous research on privately-led crowdfunding. In contrast to previous studies, our analysis showed that disclosing creator information does not significantly impact fundraising. This indicates that the credibility of the local government itself plays a role, rendering individual creator profiles less critical in the eyes of donors. Furthermore, while all the estimation models used in this study showed that collaboration with the private sector has a statistically negative impact on fundraising, estimations of the heterogeneity treatment effect using a machine learning model suggested that disclosing information about the private sector partners through video could mitigate the adverse effects. These findings will provide practitioners with new insights into the potential of public–private partnerships in civic crowdfunding, enabling them to realize more efficient project designs.