I'm a big fan of crowd funding/crowd investment. First, it shortens the distance between loaner and recipient: you really know what your money is doing while you give it away. You know which projects have been made possible with your money. Second, it allows to create something new. New projects. This is not the case for other forms of investment, such as buying existing stocks at the stock exchange.
However, crowd investment is not without riks for the investor. If a project isn't doing well, you might not receive any interest, and even loose all the money invested. Therefore, it's so crucial to spread the risk by investing small sums in a large number of different projects.
In this GitHub project, I'm creating an educational shiny app that visualizes the impact of spreading the risk on possible monetary outcomes for the crowd investor. Once finished, it will be interactive and visualize how the risk decreases when one invests small sums in a larger number of projects. By playing around with the app, the user should gain an intuitive insight about possible risks and opportunities, and will hopefully make better investment decisions.
This project is still in the development phase. 2018-02-04
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Here's the link to the Wikipedia page on crowd funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding
Note that I'm only referring to debt-based crowd funding here (also called crowd lending).
My two favorite crowd funding platforms (with a focus on renewable energy and social entrepreneurship) are Bettervest and GLS Crowd (both based in Germany, but Bettervest has a focus on investing worldwide).