Non-tangible rewards in crowdfunding: exploring motivation and backers’ preferences

Crowdfunding has become an important tool for nonprofit organizations and mission-driven initiatives and enabling a reciprocal exchange between fundraisers and backers. While material rewards often play an important role in donor engagement, non-tangible rewards – such as symbolic acknowledgement, personal experiences, or opportunities to contribute to social impact – can also positively impact the willingness of backers to participate. This study aims to investigate how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, along with psychological and social factors, influence backers’ preferences for non-tangible rewards in cause-oriented crowdfunding campaigns. Drawing on the distinct categories of experience-based, symbolic, and impact rewards, we apply the emotional rewards pyramid as a conceptual tool to categorize non-tangible rewards based on emotional intensity. Using a survey of 250 experienced crowdfunding participants and applying structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), we examine how reward-based and altruistic motivations predict preferences for different non-tangible rewards and how subjective norms and economic responsibility moderate these relationships. Our findings reveal that experiential rewards appeal to both altruistic and reward-motivated backers, while symbolic rewards are primarily valued by altruistic individuals. Impact rewards align most closely with altruistically motivated backers and are negatively associated with reward-driven motivation. We also examine how subjective norms and personal economic responsibility moderate the relationship between backers’ motivations and preferences for non-tangible rewards. These insights have practical implications for nonprofit organizations seeking to design emotionally resonant crowdfunding campaigns. It also contributes to crowdfunding and nonprofit marketing literature by introducing a novel typology of emotional rewards and integrating motivation theory with giving behavior.