Since 2014 the GLA’s Regeneration Unit have been developing and delivering an innovative and pioneering new tool to support local investment in London’s communities: The Mayor’s Crowdfunding Programme. The initiative explores the potential for the GLA to pledge to civic crowdfunding projects as ‘one of the crowd’, enabling London’s citizens to deliver and manage spaces and places that suit local needs and identities.
This study, commissioned by the Regeneration Unit and undertaken by the GLA’s Opinion Research team, attends to the ‘softer’ social impacts of regeneration interventions that can be easily overlooked in traditional evaluative research for policy. Significantly, the report deals only and entirely with non-financial benefits of civic crowdfunding, attending to a gap in research previously identified by Nesta (2015). Through a period of qualitative research, specifically semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation, with a sample of 7 project groups, insight and understanding has been gathered on the experiences of those who embark on delivering a project as part of the Mayor’s Crowdfunding Programme.
Technical Details
Results and findings are based on in depth qualitative research with 7 project groups funded in Rounds 1 or 2 of the Mayor’s Crowdfunding Programme.
Research was undertaken on projects’ sites throughout May of 2016.
All data collection was undertaken with the same template, by the same researcher. All data was thematically coded into one data-set.
Participants were self-selecting, from the pool of funded projects. The research does not claim to speak for all project experiences, or experiences outside of the Mayor’s Crowdfunding Programme