Greening crowdfunding campaigns: an investigation of message framing and effective communication strategies for funding success

Abstract

PurposeRecognising the growing importance of environmental and sustainable activities and the role of communication strategies in soliciting their financing, this work investigates the influence of message framing, green emphasis and quantitative information on the probability of green crowdfunding campaigns' success.Design/methodology/approachThis analysis is based on crowdfunding campaigns published between 2015 and 2020 on the Indiegogo platform in the category “Community projects – Environment”. The study develops an in-depth qualitative content analysis of the projects before performing an empirical examination to determine funding causes.FindingsCommunication strategies (message framing, green emphasis and quantitative goals) affect funding success. However, project category moderates the impact of message framing and green emphasis on campaign success. While positive framing increases agri-food campaign success, negative framing is more effective for clean energy and climate preservation projects. Moreover, indication of a quantitative goal and a marked green emphasis in a project's presentation increase campaign success, but a too marked green emphasis is only effective for agri-food projects.Practical implicationsGreen entrepreneurs and campaign managers must work carefully on their projects' communication, accounting for the type of product proposed, emphasising green components in its description and utilising quantitative information to present future goals. These strategies maximise backers' responses and enable entrepreneurs to obtain funding. The authors’ findings may be extended to other contexts, including the banking sector, to craft effective communication strategies for green financial products.Originality/valueBy applying framing theory in a new context (i.e. the online financing of green entrepreneurs), this study identifies new campaign success determinants and provides evidence for the moderating role of project category. Furthermore, the study highlights the need to develop different communication strategies for social and environmental-oriented projects.

Construct and Priority Ranking of Factors Affecting Crowdfunding for Green Products

“…Among the five primary factors contributing to the crowdfunding success of green products, "green diversified context" was the most influential, agreeing with the results of previous studies because "context"-related factors were found to be crucial to crowd-funding success socially [32,78,79,83,[86][87][88][89], environmentally [32,80], politically [82], and economically [82]. Further, the value of a green-diversified context perceived by funders also echoes the findings of previous studies in terms of the general consent regarding the importance of environmental, economic, and social impacts to sustainability [58,66].…”

“…Cosma et al [79] concluded that the variety of partners in a platform's network influences crowdfunding success. Rossolini et al [80] emphasized three communication strategies (message framing, green emphasis, and quantitative goals) essential for green product crowdfunding, and dos Santos Felipe et al [81] regarded exposure times, the number of supporters, and the higher volume of rewards as three elements based on practical aspects. Given the importance of the four mentioned factors (green product design, manufacturing, marketing, and the green diversified context) in the product life cycle for green products, as well as their value to sustainability, this study considers the following hypothesis.…”

Backer funding intention in reward-based crowdfunding: service-dominant logic and stimulus-organism-response perspectives

“…Third, crowdfunding ecosystems are complex, collective and collaborative networks in which resources are integral to project success. Scholars have examined backer- (Bagheri et al, 2019;Zhang and Chen, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019), entrepreneur-(Buttic e andRovelli, 2020;Kim and Hall, 2020) and project-related characteristics and presentation design (Moradi and Dass, 2019;Robiady et al, 2021;Rossolini et al, 2021) in successful crowdfunding projects. However, all such works adopted a homological perspective.…”

“…However, information asymmetry can occur due to a lack of backer experience and expertise (Moradi and Badrinarayanan, 2021), insufficient information regarding project and entrepreneur characteristics (Ryu and Kim, 2018) and entrepreneurs' reluctance to disclose detailed project information in an effort to protect their innovations (Kang et al. , 2016; Rossolini et al. , 2021).…”

Managing the external financing constraints of social enterprises: A systematic review of a diversified research landscape

“…focusing on the advantages of climate mitigation strategies) or negative (e.g. focusing on the threats of climate change) (Maehle et al., 2021; Rossolini et al., 2021). Another strategy used by some social enterprises is to instrumentalize philanthropic investors by encouraging them to share their personal stories to motivate potential investors (Maclean et al., 2013).…”