Understanding and leveraging social networks for crowdfunding: implications for support tools.

Crowdfunding provides a new way for creatives to share their work and acquire resources from their social network to influence what new ideas are realized. Yet, we understand very little about this growing phenomenon. Grounded in existing work on social network analysis, we investigate how crowdfunders strategically use their social network to reach their campaign goals. We interviewed 47 crowdfunding project creators to understand the challenges they face. We identified three main themes, which include understanding network capabilities, activating network connections, and expanding network reach. From our findings, we develop initial design implications for support tools to help crowdfunding project creators better understand and leverage their social network.