Back in February, I took a look at whether crowdfunding investment dried up during the holiday season as people allocated their extra dollars elsewhere. What I found was that offerings that launched in December raised nearly $2,500 during their first week and that offering successes seemed to dip during the holidays.
As commitments and new deals dropped around $400,000 and 9 offerings from May to June this year, I thought it was worth revisiting a similar analysis, but this time for the summer months. When I think of summer, I think of vacations, being disappointed by the performance of the Phillies, and time away from the computer. I assume most people think about two of these three, and the question then is, do they also think of crowdfunding, or do summer activities “crowd out” investing from the mind.
Looking at just a trend of overall commitments, it appears that there is a slight dip in commitments at the start of the summer, only to ramp back up towards the end of the summer and into the early fall (and then that dreaded holiday season dip). So the drop this June is not at all surprising. And July is already on pace to exceed June’s numbers by a wide margin ($7M compared to $5.4M). But as with any trend, it’s always a worthwhile exercise to dig a little more into the data.
If we focus on just the difference in investment between the summer months (June, July, and August – apologies to the Autumnal equinox enthusiasts), we can run a regression to see if there is a statistical difference in investment during this window compared to the rest of the year. And although we see a downward trend in June, for the “Summer” months, there is no statistical difference in the dollars committed to crowdfunding during these months compared to the rest of the year.
But what happens when we look at each month individually, as not all summer months are created equal (a number of online surveys point to July being the most popular summer vacation month). Looking first at June, we find that investment declines (consistent with our discussion above), but the result is not statistically significant.
I also find no statistical difference in dollars raised in the first week for investments that launch in June (as I discussed in my February piece, academic research on crowdfunding points to a large chunk of investment coming in the early weeks of the offering). During July, investment increases, on average, $1,700 more than in other months, but I find no impact on “first-week” investment for July launches. August finds a return to decrease in investment trend, but again, this amount is not statistically significant.
So what do we make of this? Unlike when we looked at December and found some across the board significant decreases in investment, the summer doldrums often discussed in the stock market don’t appear to factor in here and significantly impact investment in a negative manner. In fact, we actually see an increase in investment in July, perhaps when investors have some more free time on their hands to take a look at investment opportunities. So as we enter the second half of July, hop on board and ride the wave of crowdfunding investment as it gears up for the fall.
