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January 25th, 2023
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Women outperform men in seed crowdfunding, according to analysis by PwC and The Crowdfunding Centre
PWC | July 11, 2017
New report shows that while more men use seed crowdfunding than women, women are more successful in reaching their finance goals than men in all sectors and geographic regions across the globe.
- This analysis of over 450,000 seed crowdfunding campaigns from nine of the largest global crowdfunding platforms shows that female-led campaigns were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than male-led campaigns
- While men typically seek higher funding targets, female-led projects achieve a greater average pledge amount than male-led projects: on average each individual backer contributes $87 to women and $83 to men (a difference of almost 5%)
- Even in more male dominated sectors, such as the technology sector, where there are nine male-led campaigns to every one female-led campaign, female-led campaigns are more successful, 13% to 10% respectively
- The US and the UK are the most thriving countries for seed crowdfunding with the largest volumes of campaigns. In both countries, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets compared with 24% and 26% of female-led campaigns respectively
- However, men continue to use seed crowdfunding substantially more than women and raise substantially more finance than female-led campaigns; 89% of campaigns raising over $1 million were male-led campaigns compared with 11% of female-led
PwC and The Crowdfunding Centre today launched their joint report, Women Unbound: Unleashing female entrepreneurial potential, which explores the experience of women in achieving finance raising success through seed crowdfunding compared with more traditional finance raising routes.
The report findings, which are based on two full years of seed crowdfunding data (2015-16) tracked by The Crowdfunding Centre, include the results of over 465,000 seed crowdfunding campaigns from nine of the largest crowdfunding platforms globally.
The report finds that while men clearly use seed crowdfunding more than women, women are more successful at crowdfunding than men. Seventeen percent of male-led campaigns reach their finance target, compared with 22% of female-led campaigns. Overall campaigns led by women were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than those led by men across a wide range of sectors, geography, and cultures.
Crowdfunding is a disruptive innovation which has provided new routes to funding for individuals, startups and growing businesses. It enables them to engage and interact directly with the market and with thousands of backers, supporters, customers and potential partners like never before. Seed crowdfunding is the use of ‘rewards based’ crowdfunding platforms to fund the creation, launch or development of new businesses, products, and services where backers pay upfront for a product, service or project. Since its inception, seed crowdfunding's footprint has continued to spread with the levels of finance raised through the nine platforms analysed in this report jumping from $10 million in 2009 to over $767 million in 2016, with backers from over 200 countries.
Women-led campaigns performed better in terms of securing their funding goals than campaigns led by men when we segregate the data for every sector and every country. In countries with the largest volumes of seed crowdfunding, the UK, and the US, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets. Yet female-led campaigns outperformed, with 24% of women in the US and 26% of women in the UK successfully reaching their campaign funding target.
This trend continues in countries where seed crowdfunding is not yet as wide-scale or successful. For example, 11% of female-led campaigns in Africa were successful compared with 3% of male. And in E7 countries (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, and Turkey), 10% of female-led campaigns reached their goals compared to 4% of male-led campaigns.
Even in what some consider to be more masculine sectors, for example, technology, where we see nine male seed crowdfunders for technology ventures to every one female crowdfunder, 13% of women were successful in achieving their funding goal compared to just 10% of men. Similarly, in the digital technology sector, where there are three male-led campaigns to every one female-led, women achieved a 16% success rate compared to just 9% for men.
Media contacts:
The Crowdfunding Centre | PwC |
About the Crowdfunding Centre
The Crowdfunding Centre is crowdfunding's global observatory, founded by Barry James and his team in 2013 which now provides the world's largest repository of data on crowdfunds harnessed to provide data and evidence based reports and tools for business, government, entrepreneurs, investors, and academia. Find out more and get reports and data for your sector, country or city by visiting TheCrowdfundingCentre.com
About PwC
At PwC, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We’re a network of firms in 157 countries with more than 223,000 people who are committed to delivering quality in assurance, advisory and tax services. Find out more and tell us what matters to you by visiting us at www.pwc.com.
PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.
SOURCE: PWC press room (view release)
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