CREATING A NEW CROWDFUNDING CHANNEL FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH: EXPLORING THE USER NEEDS

Over the years, the funding of scientific projects has been the responsibility of traditional research funding institutions, such as government programmes or mainstream trusts. However, there are areas and topics of research which, for a variety of reasons, remain underfunded by traditional programmes. Crowdfunding has provided an alternative means of providing financial support to researchers and projects which ordinarily are not of interest to government funding agencies and other major funders of research. This paper explores the user needs of a nascent crowdfunding channel for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research in Europe. The goal of the research was to understand and formalise a set of users' needs that could help in setting up this nascent crowdfunding solution. The users are the SSH researchers who seek financial support on scientific projects and the funders who are motivated to invest in a project. We utilised a mixed method of research design to collect both qualitative and quantitative data about the users and their needs. This included codesigning work and a Europe-wide questionnaire. The outcome of this work was formalised in a set of practical recommendations for the new crowdfunding channel, which might have a broader application for the design of crowdfunding solutions. This research is part of a large European research project, focused on building a discovery platform for SSH, called GoTriple, of which the new crowdfunding channel is one of the services.