Abstract—IT-enabled crowdfunding is an emerging model used by either individuals or charity organizations to solicit funds from the public. Academia and industry have studied how and why these crowdfunding platforms work from commercial and marketing perspectives. However, charitable crowdfunding is usually ne-glected by previous literature, particularly, how effective of charitable crowdfund-ing projects in alleviating poverty. In this study, we discuss the advantages of charitable crowdfunding platforms compared to traditional charity. Besides, our data analysis indicates that charitable crowdfunding faces concerns with regard to imbalanced resources allocation, low success rate and internet fraud, indicating the relatively poor performance on overall poverty alleviation. This study will help industry practitioners understand the present situation of charitable crowd-funding platforms and how they could implement charitable crowdfunding.

 

Index Terms—charitable crowdfunding, IT-enabled crowdfunding platforms, poverty alleviation

Cite: Xizi Wang and Li Wang, "The Role of Charitable Crowdfunding Platforms on Poverty Alleviation," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 72-76, May 2019. doi: 10.12720/jait.10.2.72-76