Need Of A Localized Social Network Platform For Crowdfunding In Pakistan

The social networks have empowered every person today and have become effective platforms for people to share things of their interest and concern. People and NGOs are also using social networks to raise funds for social, personal and communal causes. Different Non-profit organizations run campaigns to raise funds for their projects using some traditional techniques i.e. by trending on hashtags, tweeting and creating Facebook pages. More than 85% of Pakistan population is middle or under middle class and about 25M Pakistani use social networks. People especially students from middle/lower-middle/poor classes mostly are in need of funds to support their family, education or business but have very few platforms to raise funds. Moreover, they do not have enough technical knowledge and resources to run effective campaign for fund-raising on social networks. Working on a dataset of over 10 projects on 5 crowd-funding platforms with collective funding over Rs.1 M in Pakistan and analyzing over 20 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts about campaigns for fund-raising for different causes, this research offers a description of different factors of success and failure for crowdfunded projects and suggests that social networks based crowdfunding platform can increase projects success rate and can win trust and reliance of stakeholders. Our focus is to evaluate the need of an authentic, recommendation-based, reliable and credible platform for Pakistan where fund seekers request donations from a large group of potential donors and donors can contribute funds to qualified projects based on their preferences. This platform is also intended to overcome language barrier for peoples to work for their causes by providing localized version i.e. local language, currency and other features.