The Role of SMS Fundraising in Supporting Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: The Case of Project 8100-A Crowdfunding
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Date
2022-02
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A.A.U
Abstract
Crowd funding is one alternative to traditional source of fund like banks. In its common form,
crowd funding approaches help individuals donate small money by using their credit card and
internet. But, alternative to internet, Ethiopians have demonstrated the use of SMS messaging
technologies to back different projects including GERD. But there is lack of knowledge on how to
design and manage crowd fund in general. This problem is even more serious when it comes to
designing and managing SMS based crowd funding campaigns. In line with this, the current
paper analyzed over two million records of 8100A crowd funding platform. The dataset is for
2020 and 2021. This analysis is complemented with qualitative semi structured interview.
Analysis of the dataset revealed, many insightful information that informs on how to design and
run effective crowd funding campaigns. Specifically, the study revealed: participation of citizens
in terms of across the seven days of the week, majority of Ethiopians participated on Thursday
while Saturday is the least, the number of participants in 2020 is almost 9 times that of
participants in 2021,individuals whose phone starts with 0920 are the highest number of backers
of GERD while individuals whose phone codes starts with 0911, 0950, 0970, and 0980 are
among the least, the highest number of citizens participated in the months of May, June, and July
while the number of participants is getting lower and lower after September, the number of
subscribers to donate and the number of unsubscribes from the service is almost equal. These
insights are really touchy and to be fixed immediately than delayed.
Analysis of semi structured interview data, the above insights, and some of the principles of
crowd funding, 8100A crowd funding campaign is not designed and managed well. There are
many missing elements. For example: the content of ad message is not informative, not
persuasive, lack of interactivity of the platform, time the ad broadcasted is not appropriate, there
are also some concerns on how it is managed. Thus, there are many areas to improve so that
proportional number of citizens register and back the project in a more sustainable manner
rather than unsubscribing from the service.
Keywords: GERD, SMS based crowd funding, data analytics, and visual analyti
Description
Keywords
Data Analytics, SMS Based Crowd Funding