Corporate Social Responsibility and Crowdfunding: The Experience of the Colectual Platform in Empowering Economic and Sustainable Projects

Abstract

In recent years, sustainable crowdfunding has been one of the key elements in the search for new sources of financing. This has involved eliminating financial barriers and intermediaries, bringing entrepreneurs’ projects closer to fund providers, and thus instigating changes in traditional investment and profitability parameters. Among these indicators, the sustainable business return and its relationship with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) could be a relevant factor to improve the cost of funding, to explain the return on assets (ROA), and, consequently, impacting on the return on equity (ROE). In this context, this paper takes as a reference 101 projects that are part of Colectual’s lending. We analyze factors such as sustainability—the application of CSR across a social responsibility index; the financial characteristics of the company—liquidity, leverage, and solvency; and the characteristics of the loans related to crowdfunding—amount, maturity, and charge rate of the loan. Our study provides empirical evidence that, besides financial characteristics, the commitment to CSR can improve collective lending and the management of resources, as well as enhance the capital wealth of companies, by improving shareholder profitability or ROE. Investors consider not only financial risk but also sustainability factors.