The language that gets people to give: phrases that predict success on kickstarter

By Tanushree Mitra, Eric Gilbert. Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2014

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter--where entrepreneurs and artists look to the internet for funding--have quickly risen to prominence. However, we know very little about the factors driving the 'crowd' to take projects to their funding goal. In this paper we explore the factors which lead to successfully funding a crowdfunding project. We study a corpus of 45K crowdfunded projects, analyzing 9M phrases and 59 other variables commonly present on crowdfunding sites. The language used in the project has surprising predictive power accounting for 58.56% of the variance around successful funding. A closer look at the phrases shows they exhibit general persuasion principles. For example, also receive two reflects the principle of Reciprocity and is one of the top predictors of successful funding. We conclude this paper by announcing the release of the predictive phrases along with the control variables as a public dataset, hoping that our work can enable new features on crowdfunding sites--tools to help both backers and project creators make the best use of their time and money.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/feeec5240e86e914d87356b34210569526bf0a74

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Citations in the corpus

Lateral Exchange Markets: How Social Platforms Operate in a Networked Economy (2018, background): “Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform for creative projects such as films, art and performances, books, music, video games, and gadgets (Mitra and Gilbert 2014).”
Peer-to-Peer Crowdfunding: Information and the Potential for Disruption in Consumer Lending (2015, positive): “Mitra and Gilbert (2014) use textual analysis on 45,815 projects posted on Kickstarter (a donation-based crowdfunding platform, where investors are paid it product or access to the startup activity), and compile a list of phrases and words that are associated with successful funding bids.”
IntroAssist: A Tool to Support Writing Introductory Help Requests (2018, background): “Linguists find that language that elicit positive emotions and reciprocity are more likely to get a positive help giving responses online [26,46], findings based in extensive psychology literature on influence [12].”
Let’s Make Your Request More Persuasive: Modeling Persuasive Strategies via Semi-Supervised Neural Nets on Crowdfunding Platforms (2019, background): “Based on a corpus of 45K crowd-funded projects, Mitra and Gilbert (2014) found that 9M phrases commonly present in crowd-funding have reasonable predictive power in accounting for variance around successful funding, suggesting that language does exhibit some general principles of persuasion.”
Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions (2016, background): “such as intensity, valence and framing [1, 2, 4, 6, 23], and (ii) social aspects, such as social proof and authority [7, 10, 33], there is also (iii) the relationship between the opinion holder and her belief, such as her certainty in it and its importance to her [44, 45, 54, 59].”