Crowdfunding, a Model for Attracting Donor Contributions

Nowadays, with the development of electronic social networks and Web 2.0, a more suitable environment is provided to help the needy. And the institutions engaged in charity should try to improve both the quantity and quality of their services by increasing their familiarity and use of these new capacities. One of these is crowdfunding. Charitable organizations can develop or use crowdfunding platforms, to expose the difficulties and needs of their target audience in the form of a specific plan to the public and subsequently ask for the people’s contributions to meet those needs. Today, several basic models are being used for crowdfunding, namely donation, reward, pre-orders, borrowing and stocks or profit and loss sharing. With some of these models, especially donation and reward, we can practice crowdfunding for charity. It should be noted that crowdfunding is an agile way by which money is collected from a large number of small donors instead of few people with large amount of money. This could lead to the spread of the culture of charity and its etiquette in society. This article first examines the practice of crowdfunding with a descriptive/analytical method and then explains the use of this model for attracting donors’ contributions. The legal components of this model have been defined by using contracts of mandate and gift (hiba).Finally, after mentioning the cultural implications of the presented model in the society, we have referred to some other benefits of it.