Can crowdfunding help homeless people?
This blog post is part of the Finthropology series Digital Human Finance. We present qualitative research to showcase the kind of insights that can come from deeper, human-focused studies and how they can be used to build new sustainable financial solutions. We focus on the story and its potential in each presented publication.
Today’s paper presents insights from a study of “unstably-housed” people in Chicago. It illustrates how people with limited offline resources can see social media as a means to change their situation. This insight is unfolded from five anonymised cases. The research participants were homeless or shifting between staying in shelters and temporary housing. For most of them, offline resources were restricted to other homeless people or employees of nonprofit and social service organisations. Most of them use the Internet and social media to some extent.
The research participants saw Facebook and crowdfunding platforms as a way to reach out to strangers outside their offline connections in the hope of getting help or raising money to make a new start. In this respect, social media seems a “magic”—and free—way to reach out to the world. It also illustrates how this “connective ambition” can be disappointing as offline inequalities reproduce in the digital space.
The study was part of a three-year ethnographic project on homelessness and digital inequality. Data was collected through 80 field observations, including informal interviews and digital ethnography of participant behaviour on social media, notably Facebook. It further included 12 semiformal interviews with five individual participants. The participants had different backgrounds with regard to age, race, gender, education, work experience and digital skills.
Two participants, Vicki and Eric, tried to reach new contacts through Facebook friend requests—as opposed to their predominantly local and poor closer contacts. Eric is a white male in his early sixties with little education. He had built a network of mostly international contacts on Facebook and reached out to them for help. His initiative was not successful, however, as his appeal did not include a compelling and personal story that might induce these very weak ties to actually contribute money.
Vicky is a white female in her early sixties with a high school degree who had left an abusive home and spent years travelling between cities. She saw social media as a way to find funding to lease an apartment with other homeless friends. She used a crowdfunding platform and shared her crowdfunding page with recently acquired contacts via Facebook. To her surprise, she received suggestions from the crowdfunding platform to pay for social media marketing, but rejected this as she saw this as contradictory to the idea of free social media. Her campaign failed to raise money.
Eric’s and Vicki’s initiatives both proved unsuccessful. Though they managed to create new contacts and start a campaign, they did not have the skills to create a compelling story or to connect with people who would actually donate. In this way, they experienced a reproduction of their offline difficulties in the digital space.
Leticia and Biana are both black women in their early fifties with some college education. They both used Facebook to reconnect with previous friends, avoiding Eric’s and Vicki’s difficulties using new connections. Neither, however, were specific in describing their situation or asking for help.
Briana had a good group of previous high school connections—some quite successful and well-off. However, her ambition to raise money was contradicted by the fact that she didn’t like to expose her homeless condition on her Facebook page or even mention that she has lost her job. Despite her “connective ambition”, she felt that you must present yourself in the best light on social media. This priority of personal privacy and a positive self-image also led to an unsuccessful venture.
Leticia struggled with a combination of issues as she had a background of being violent and spending time in prison. She had fewer previous ties to reach out to, but still hoped that she might find an old contact who made good money. Unfortunately, due to her background, she held a very low profile both offline and online, which was not conducive to a strong campaign. She also had very limited digital skills, and was not sure how to best maintain privacy, such as whether could delete unwanted connections.
Overall, these two initiatives were unsuccessful due to lack of digital experience, fear of sharing personal information, and difficulties with the weak ties they were trying to reach.
Only one of the participants, Paul, a white male in his late fifties with a Master’s degree in computer science, was able to launch a successful campaign. He actually raised $1300 to pay a few months of rent, allowing him to move off the street. He achieved this by carefully building a crowdfunding campaign illustrating his personal background working in IT and his difficult present circumstances. He deliberately reached out to previous connections (digital weak ties) through text and email. He avoided Facebook, however, as he did not want to experience comments from contacts who might gloat over his bad luck.
The paper opens up an area that is understudied. The deep personal insights presented bring a new understanding of how inequalities overlap between offline and online realities. The stories illustrate how the offline privileges of income, education, and gender are reproduced in the digital realm. They also help explain why new digital tools may create high hopes for inclusion, and yet may reinforce exclusion for already-marginalised users. Connective ambition represents an attempt to overcome exclusion, but instead of enhancing digital capital it results in further disappointment of vulnerable people.
So, how might these insights be relevant in digital finance?
First of all, the paper provides the key insight that background and context are absolutely critical when developing digital solutions for consumers—and particularly for people in less financially or socially included groups. As described in the introduction to this series, the financial services industry tends to focus on technology adoption models when introducing new solutions. These are generally based on perceived usefulness and ease of use, with little, if any, reference to context.
The insights from the personal stories told above illustrate that P2P solutions like crowdfunding may indeed raise the hope of reaching old and new contacts and create a path out of difficulties. The stories also highlight that a crowdfunding platform alone might not be sufficient. There is a need to include information about how to create a compelling campaign—particularly if the campaign is for donations. There is also a need to help new users understand who best to approach with a given campaign to get a positive response. And possibly to tie a campaign into a longer term plan.
Marler, W. (2022). “You Can Connect with Like, the World!”: Social Platforms, Survival Support, and Digital Inequalities for People Experiencing Homelessness. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmab020
