Financial-Return Crowdfunding for Energy and Sustainability in the German-Speaking Realm

The transformation of the energy system is among the most relevant topics of the current public debate in the German-speaking realm. Crowdfunding is suitable for promoting sustainable development, such as financing renewable energies. We investigate success determinants of financial-return crowdfunding to understand how this financing technique can contribute to realizing sustainable development, such as the energy transition. We conduct a cross-platform study and consider sustainably oriented campaigns to answer two research questions: First, what determinants influence financial-return crowdfunding success? Second, how does a sustainable orientation affect these success determinants? We rely on signaling theory to investigate the effect of quality signals. We consider four meta-platforms that aggregate campaigns with sustainable and other funding purposes, obtaining a dataset of 434 financial-return crowdfunding campaigns, mainly from Austria and Germany. We use hierarchical linear regression models for our statistical analysis. Our findings indicate that sustainable orientation alone does not significantly affect crowdfunding success. Entrepreneurs can increase their chances of campaign success by raising the interest rate unless their campaign has a sustainable orientation. In sustainably oriented campaigns, the effect of the interest rate is compensated. Finally, we find no significant evidence suggesting that the campaign duration affects sustainable or non-sustainable crowdfunding success.