Show me the money!

Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of crowdfunding campaigns have been launched, but more than half of them have failed. To better understand the factors affecting campaign outcomes, this paper targets the content and usage patterns of project updates-communications intended to keep potential funders aware of a campaign's progress. We analyzed the content and usage patterns of a large corpus of project updates on Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms. Using semantic analysis techniques, we derived a taxonomy of the types of project updates created during campaigns, and found discrepancies between the design intent of a project update and the various uses in practice (e.g. social promotion). The analysis also showed that specific uses of updates had stronger associations with campaign success than the project's description. Design implications were formulated from the results to help designers better support various uses of updates in crowdfunding campaigns.

The Right Time for Crowd Communication during Campaigns for Sustainable Success of Crowdfunding: Evidence from Kickstarter Platform

“…In investigating the distribution of project updates, Xu et al [9] conducted a study that divided the campaign duration into three equal phases (the initial phase, the middle phase, and the final phase). They assessed the distribution of updates in different phases and noted that more updates were on the initial phase.…”

“…A good number of researches have been done to understand the factors that contribute to the observed dynamics of crowdfunding projects. Previous researchers have focused on identifying features that contribute to the success of campaigns [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11]. Research by Mollick [2] found, using a linear model, that the chances of success are reduced if the project creators do not offer early updates and that the funding success is influenced by project quality, goal amount, and social network ties.…”

“…Some researchers [9][10][11] have investigated the impacts of phased aspects of communication (quantity, quality, sentiment polarity, etc.) extracted from updates and comments on success prediction, but what is missing is an investigation of importance of individual aspect of communication in each phase of the campaigns.…”

“…extracted from updates and comments on success prediction, but what is missing is an investigation of importance of individual aspect of communication in each phase of the campaigns. Xu et al [9] investigated the distribution of updates into three phases (the initial phase, the middle phase, and the final phase) and found that for successful campaigns, more updates were offered in the initial phase. Chen et al [10] conducted research to investigate the impact of phased features on campaign success.…”

“…Authors in refs. [9][10][11]15] focused on investigating the correlation that exists between update and comment features to the outcome of crowdfunding campaigns without assessing the contribution of each feature. In their approach, it is difficult to capture the impact of individual update and comment features occurring in different phases of campaign duration.…”