Crowdfunding as a crisis instrument for the gastronomy industry in Germany prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected industries like gastronomy in Germany strongly. Besides the negative effects though, the unprecedented pandemic situation and the urgent need for funding boosted crowdfunding as an alternative instrument to overcome financial struggles caused by the COVID-19 crisis. This can be seen in the exploding number of campaigns on many crowdfunding platforms. Despite the uncertain situation for everyone, many of the campaigns were successful. This lively development of crowdfunding rooted in the pandemic has prompted the curiosity of scientists from different countries to research the changes within the crowdfunding campaigns, the initiators’ as well as the backers’ behavior.
The present study aims to research this topic for the gastronomy industry in Germany by analyzing about 500 crowdfunding campaigns from the biggest German donation- and reward-based platform, Startnext. The research period is a five-month window (March-August), not only during the pandemic (2020) but also the years before (2017-2019). It is remarkable that the amount of crisis-related campaigns raised up to 1.6 million euros. In most of the cases individuals as initiators were looking for funding to ensure their own economic survival. In contrast, the non-crisis related campaigns, defined in this study as all the campaigns within the research period of 2017-2019, have been mostly initiated by businesses. Our results provide insight into characteristics like success rate and average funding of backers per campaign, as well as the initiators of the campaigns and their purposes.