Visible Hearts, Visible Hands: A Smart Crowd Donation Platform

On existing crowdfunding platforms, the allocation of money is often not regulated, which leads to less-than-ideal distribution of resources. For example, recent donations to hurricane victims through their crowdfunding campaigns often lead to overfunding of certain victims while underfunding others. Inspired by algorithms from economic theories, our proposed Smart Crowd Donate system encourages donors to express preferences to multiple projects and reallocates funds dynamically across these preferences over time. We conducted a user study in which recruited 452 participants to simulate a small scale of crowdfunding. The findings of our user study supported the idea that the Smart Crowd Donate system has potential to efficiently distribute funds to projects and allows more projects to receive the amount of money they need.