Summary:

“The Language that Gets People to Give” is a paper written on what kinds of language and its use make for successful crowdfunded ideas. It begins with examples of both successful and unsuccessful ideas on Kickstarter, namely “Pebble” and “Ninja Baseball” and then attempts to figure out why one was successful, and the other not. Then it goes into depth on previous research in the field, and most importantly, why it is different or how it improves on the previous work. Then it goes over the different variables used and how the analysis was done. It then goes over the things that were found as the most important, pretty much all phrases, and shows a list of the phrases it found to be important. Finally it goes over other ideas that may help drive crowdfunding, such as giving out extra products as a reward for donating a certain amount, or giving out personal thanks.

Response:

This paper very quickly goes into detail about its analysis, and it’s actually quite understandable, especially compared to some of the stuff we’ve read before. This is good because language analysis can be difficult, and I know it’s something my group wants to do some work with. The fact that about half of projects get funded, where half obviously do not, is interesting. It’s just odd that it ends up being an almost perfect 50/50 split. The controlling for genre or category specific ideas and phrases is incredibly important to me. As a group working on figuring out false news articles it is integral that we be able to pull out things that aren’t necessarily part of the article, or phrases that are just used in the subject. Because of this, it’s something we’ll need to think about quite a bit. The statistics on adding the controls and phrases to the model is also incredible, 2.4% error is insanely low for almost any model. The table of phrases as well as the public data set may end up being very useful to our project as well. Even if they won’t be the same, because they won’t ours is dealing with news and informative articles not crowdfunding, the ideas are very similar. So the detail on the analysis should prove extremely useful. It’s also good to know that our teacher understands language analysis, I’ll be asking you more questions soon. Finally some of the alternative reasons for success could be useful to think about on the news standpoint. Each of them translates at least slightly, and if nothing else are things we should bear in mind and start thinking of things which pertain specifically to our subject (such as what sources an article cites, or what type of articles it cites).

 

Questions:

What other than language might determine how successful a crowdfunded idea is?

Have you ever participated in a crowdfunding? What was it for? Do you think it was a good idea to support it?

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Summary:

In the paper “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter,” the authors look into the power of phrases and words to encourage users to users to donate and use them as an indicator for the likelihood of a project being funded or not. They mainly focus on the language used in the project pitch but factor in other variables such as amount requested and timeline for the project. However even with the inclusion of other variables they found that the top 100 predictors were still phrases. The phrases were also classified into 13 overall categories: art, music, publishing, design, film and video, tech, dance, theater, photography, food, games, fashion, and comics. Each had respective sub-categories and the phrases were analyzed to see if they were exclusive to a single category since those would be useless and skew results. A lot of what the paper also found supported my experiences as well. Users love getting something in return and a lot of kickstarters will offer “limited editions” or “exclusive” items in return for reaching certain levels of donation. This is actually added to another grouping of categories: Reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, liking, and authority. All of which are widely used tactics in selling things to people

Reflections:

I will start by saying that throughout the paper I was wondering if I could take advantage of these phrases to try and get myself funded for something but then I realized that these are just indicators. I did take not of a lot of the analysis that went on in the paper, more so than previous ones. This one actually had very descriptive explanations of what each analysis was doing and how they worked. So not only was it informative from a research standpoint but I found it to be very useful from a student one as well. I’m not sure how much the words really do play a part though. I feel like personal interest is the biggest deciding factor and people are often willing to invest more in things that they like. So within six categories of persuasion was the information skewed towards one category over the others in statistically significant way? This article was still very interesting. We really do take everything for granted when the time and consideration people put into wordsmithing could easily be worth it.

Questions:

• Do these phrases hold true across all donation/crowdfunding sites?
• Do identical phrases using synonyms have the same impact?
• Inclusion of stretch goals and updates didn’t seem to be included but if they were to be would they have any appreciable impact?
• Do these phrases have any implications for advertising in real life? Could they affect in-person donation drives?
• Would this study be more useful if they were able to take into account all donations and how much each was for?

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Summary:

The paper “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” examines the factors that contribute to the success of crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site for various projects to potentially earn all or no funding from online backers depending on whether the project’s funding goal is reached or not respectively. The paper builds off a similar prior study by looking at the language of the project pitch in addition to more project attributes. It was found that language such as word choice and phrasing played a large role in the success of crowdfunding projects. The phrases were selected by processing and filtering scraped project descriptions. Additional variables included project goal/duration, number of pledge levels, minimum pledge amount, featured in Kickstarter, video present/duration, etc. The phrases were categorized into six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, liking, and authority.

Reflection:

I found the results of the paper to be interesting and not too surprising since language is powerful and important if used correctly, especially since seemingly similar words have different conations. It is used all the time in marketing, so the results of the paper could be applied to other crowdsourcing site or products in general since the phrases were not selected for specifically Kickstarter. For example, the language aspect could possibly be applied to a product on Amazon or a channel on YouTube to increase success rates.

Questions:

• Are the phrases equally influential to all audiences/readers/consumers of the project?
• How different do the results vary depending on the site?
• Are the phrases only influential to the reader if the reader is not aware of the influence?
• How well does this apply to non-crowdsourcing sites?
• How many people read the project description completely versus just watching the video/pictures.
• Would first impressions or prior knowledge of the project affect the success?

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Summary

The researchers of “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” explore what makes a Kickstarter campaign successful by looking at what phrases they use on their homepage. With their dependent variable being whether they were funded or not funded they also controlled for several variables such as having a video or how long the campaign lasted. They created a dictionary by scraping phrases used in a Kickstarter’s homepage using Beautiful Soup. They grouped the phrases they had scraped into meaningful categories using LIWC. They then ran a statistical analysis using penalized logistic regression on their findings. They found several trends that indicated success. For instance, if a Kickstarter offered reciprocity they were more likely to be funded. However, if they showed signs of doubt or used negative wording like “not been able to” they were less likely to be funded.

 

Reflection

Some of their results didn’t surprise me like their findings on reciprocity and social proof. A lot of it can be linked to psychology and sociology and how the behavior of others can affect how likely we are to participate in something. I think it would have been interesting to see, like the researchers suggest, how exploring the social network aspect can affect Kickstarter campaigns. It was interesting to see which phrases seemed to have a positive relationship with whether a campaign got funded though. There were some odd phrases like “dressed up” that weren’t obvious to me why that would make a negative impact. I also thought it funny that “cats” seemed to have a positive impact and could only reach the same conclusions the researchers did.

 

Questions

Would exploring more the reasoning of why the phrases have such an impact reveal any new information?

Would the same study on a different crowdfunding site reveal similar results or are these findings unique to Kickstarter?

Is there any correlation between the phrasing and the average size of donation?

 

 

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Summary

The paper, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter”, discusses the types of phrases and the overall usage of language that can be found in successful crowdfunding project pitches. With a focus on Kickstarter, the authors conducted their research by scraping textual content from a collection of over 45,000 Kickstarter projects to gather over 20,000 common English phrases that were used in the project pitches and analyzed them with LIWC to categorize the phrases. From the data gathered, the authors found that the top 100 predictors of funded or not funded were all dependent on phrases. These predictors were found to exhibit various features of persuasion and were categorized into 6 groups: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, liking, and authority.  At the end, all the predictive phrases found and the control variables were released a public dataset.

Reflection

This article was very interesting to read about as I never thought about how language could affect how successful a project could be. I have heard of crowdfunded projects and believed that the success of one was dependent on the idea that would be created but now I understand how the marketing of a product is just as important or more important than the actual idea. Furthermore, the correlation between certain phrases and factors of persuasion was eye opening. to learn how certain phrases could invoke factors of persuasion such as reciprocity and authority. As mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to examine how personal relevance could affect a project’s success. I believe the higher personal relevance, the more successful the project. Another possible direction for this project is to expand the research to other sites like Patreon, a subscription content service.

Questions

• Would the results be similar if this experiment was conducted using a different website?
• GoFundMe is another popular crowdfunding website but is focused more on getting funding for personal issues in comparison to Kickstarter, which is more geared towards professional projects. Would this difference have any effect on results of this research if it was performed on both sites?
• Were certain categories on the Kickstarter website more popular and successful than others?
• Are there cases where projects have been successful despite being an impractical idea due to well written pitches?

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The study explores how language usage and context on a site like Kickstarter can influence whether or not a project gets funded. The researchers used Beautiful Soup, a widely used scraper, to pull down all the text. Afterwards, they tokenized the words into unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams and then trimmed it down even more by removing certain phrases and words so that their model wouldn’t account for the scarce outliers. Outliers in this context were words or phrases that may be only relevant in certain subjects such as “game credits” or “our menu”. The words were then categorized into six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and social identity, linking, and authority. Apart from their findings, such as explicitly labeling certain phrases with projects that get funded vs phrases with projects that don’t, one of their suggestion is to perhaps create a FAQ or “Help Center” which can be of aid to the project developers as it’ll help them select words associated with successful pitches.

 

I’d be interested to see in more detail, an analysis of language usage within successful funded projects vs unsuccessful funded projects. Just because a project was funded does not mean that it was successful. This kind of study would be more to the benefit for the people that fund projects but its long term effects would be that it could help these folks perhaps use their money wisely when deciding to fund a project. Additionally, the methodology and approach used here can help my group’s project as we’re trying to identify which words or phrases are more frequently used in fake news, as oppose to reliable sources.

 

Do we find the same results of successful/unsuccessful phrases if this was done in a different language e.g. Spanish?

Does a high usage of good or bad phrases have the opposite effect?

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Reading : “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter”

Authors: Tanushree Mitra, Eric Gilbert

Summary

Mitra and Gilbert discuss the general subject, and prior research on crowd funding before elaborating on their own work. Crowd funding is when a business or project proposal uses a website to seek start up funds. Kickstarter is one such website and it does not finalize any monetary pledges until it the funding goal is met, by a deadline. Restricting their list to projects since July 2012 that were past their fund date, the authors had 45, 810 projects in their dataset. They used BeautifulSoup to scrap the html of these projects and followed a conventional bag of words model focusing on relatively common English words. Their model had over 20,000 phrases to use as predictive features.

After making their model, they used penalized logistic regression, which guards against co-linearity and sparsity by moving the co-linear coefficient’s weight to the most predictive feature. cv.glmnet, is the R implementation of this method that they used, because it also handles sparsity. Both sparsity and co-linearity were present in their data.

Their results are beautifully displayed in a figure with two phrase trees. One is of “funded” phrases that started with “pledgers will [receive, be, also, have, …]”. The other is of “not funded” phrases that started with “even a dollar [short, will, can, helps, …]”. The “funded” phrases showed man common elements, such as reciprocity (the tendency to return a favor after receiving one), and scarcity (limited supply of rare or distinct products that hold more value to pledgers).

Reflection

This makes me want to “hack” Kickstarter and make a fortune.

I read this one carefully because some of the tools and methods that the authors used are analogous to what my team would probably have to use on our project. It is interesting that the results break down into reciprocity and “money groveling”, respectively, as very strong positive and negative indicators of achieving funding. It is not especially surprising though, because it shows that pledgers have their own self interest in mind even when they are donating.

Certain markets might succeed much better in crowd funding that others. The target market has to a) have access to the internet and b) have enough extra money to bother looking at Kickstarter and c) have the time and means and interest to make use of any Kickstarter product. The successful pledge earning language in those already niche markets could be pretty different for each of the categories and sub-categories. It would be interesting to run a similar sub-analysis within the sub-markets. The authors poked into this by adding control variables, but it would be interesting to dig deeper.

Questions

Are there penalties for “over promising?” That is, if a project achieves a funding goal, it receives the funds. What if a founders of a project just kept the money and didn’t deliver anything?

Whatever happened to Ninja Baseball? That sounds awesome.

Bringing the qualitative to the quantitative is always a pain. How reliable are sentiment analysis tools? Can they be used to detect opinion?

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Summary

The study ‘The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” seeks to understand the effects social communication can have on a kickstarter’s ability to pull in donations at faster rates. The study utilized scraping software to analyze over 45,000 crowdfunded projects from Kickstarter.com, over 9,000,000 phrases, and a multitude of other variables. Some key factors that the study concluded as correlating to increased donations include:

• Reciprocity: Patrons are more likely to respond to a project if they believe that they will receive something in return for their donation.
• Scarcity: People place higher value on products they believe to be limited in quantity or exclusive to a certain group of people (typically those who donate above a threshold).
• Social Proof: Users are more likely to follow in the footsteps of previous donors who received recognition and/or praise for their participation in the crowdfunding.
• Social Identity: People respond to a sense of belonging, especially if it is to a group they already identify with. In order to further perpetuate their sense of belonging, they will donate to validate their presence within the community.
• Liking: Fairly straightforward, a product or a person behind a project will achieve greater success if it/they are well-liked.
• Authority: Greater attention will be given to a project where an authority figure is present (i.e. a film based project involving a fairly well-know or well-respected director).
• Sentiment: People are more likely to respond to a project that provides them with a deeper emotional reaction (positive or negative).

 

Reflection

            It makes sense that the above listed factors should influence people’s decision making process online since they are fairly reliable ways of influencing people in the physical world. The concepts of reciprocity and scarcity are seen all the time in marketing and commercials for products (“buy within the next 10 minutes and get a second one free”). Social proof, social identity, and liking is apparent when products point out how past users had positive experiences. Authority can be seen in celebrity endorsements such as having famous actresses in make-up commercials. Sentiment is apparent in television based donation-seeking commercials such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s (in)famous one involving images of sad animals displayed over the song ‘Arms of an Angel’. Even the negative phrases have a logical point, such as the phrase “even a dollar” allowing users to get away with giving sparse amounts of money rather than encouraging large donations through more positive reinforcement. The data mining techniques the study used were also very interesting as they give me a lot of ideas about how they can be applied to our semester project. Seeing a study where R was utilized to a more advanced degree than we observed in class was also a distinguishing tie-in.

 

Questions

• How greatly can phrases with equivalent meaning but different wording impact success? For example, two phrases that offer the same level of reciprocity but with different phrasing.
• How much does pop culture benefit/hinder the area of ‘social identity’? How much can too much specialization into a certain group of people hurt a kickstarter’s ability to attract donations or attention?
• Can this research be applied to sites not involved with crowdfunding (such as a regular social media site or a blog’s ability to attract fans)?
• Where can we see crowdfunding marketing evolving given this data?
• People often read the comments of a kickstarter to get a feel for it? How can the presence of comments be added to this study to provide greater range of perspective?

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Summary

The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is about a crowdfunding site “Kickstarter”, and the factors that lead to success on the site. The paper begins with a description of how crowdfunding websites are becoming increasingly popular, It is argued that the specific language used generates roughly around 58% of success funding the project. Research to test this theory was done on a corpus of 45K Kickstarter projects analyzing duration, project goal amount, presence of a video, and language. Out of 9 million phrases, 20,000 phrases were studied and analyzed. It is believed that knowing these specific phrases can help sites improve in the future. Six categories were developed to understand the effects of persuasion on users. Reciprocity argues that people tend to return a favor after receiving one. Scarcity means people attach more value to products if they are hard to come by. Social proof is people tend to rely on others to decide how to act, while social identity is a person’s knowledge that he or she belongs to a social group. This social group is usually established among individuals with common interests or beliefs. Liking is the idea that people are more likely to comply with another person if they like them. Lastly, authority argues that people often resort to expert opinions for making decisions. Other characteristics that have an effect on the success of the funding are social progress, emotion, cogitative thinking, personal concerns and perception rates. All of these ideas go into how a product sells, and whether or not people will invest in them.

Reflection

After reading this article, I am more aware of how our language changes people’s perceptions about products. It is very powerful and can make or break a project. Personally I had never heard of the website Kickstarter before, but am intrigued to look into donating through the site. The idea that different phrases effect the way people react to products is extraordinary. It makes me think about previous products that I have purchased, and whether or not these persuasion techniques were used on me. Although, there were many words that were tagged as negative predictors that did not come across to me that way. Phrases such as “new form of”, “information at”, and “models of” are words I personally would have used in a Kickstarter post. It would be interesting to see how many Kickstarter users actually research the phrases that they use in their posts, whether it be related to reciprocity, scarcity or authority. I think the idea of reciprocity is a large contributing factor to whether or not people donate to the project. Most people I know will only contribute to something if they are going to get something in return. If users are persuaded into believing this product is something that will benefit them, then they are more likely to volunteer. I think that if more inventors and entrepreneurs knew about this type of research, they would be much more successful raising money.

Questions

Can this research be applied to other types of websites? (Social media, news articles, blogs, etc.)

What websites already apply this type of work?

What percentage of people posting on Kickstarter actually research their vocabulary before posting?

How does Kickstarter’s competition differ?

Is Kickstarter failing in any aspect that others are succeeding on? Does this have to do with user’s language?

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Summary:

The article, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is a very interesting and intriguing article. It aims to look at what are the factors that lead to people who view a Kickstarter campaign, ultimately backing it in the long run. The authors took a sample of 45 thousand Kickstarted campaign and closely studied the effect that 20 thousand phrases had on the impact of a person either back or not backing the campaign. Kickstarter is a platform that allows companies or individuals to start and idea/product and share that idea with a goal in mind with the public. The creator sets a monetary goal of donations that must be reached before the money is then given to the creator to go and make the product they promised to make. If the monetary goal is not reached then the money is refunded to the contributors and the project is not funded. Because of this fact, it is very important that the creator(s) do a very good job in selling the contributors the idea of their product and make you want to buy it. Creators tend to use categories such as presentation of product and idea, goal amount, duration until goal would be reached, and a few others. But this paper focuses on the language used by creators that they hope will help sell their idea/product. The language used was broken up into six categories, authority, scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, liking, and social identity. Through the authors research and analysis they were surprised to find that language is not only a key player in getting a contributor to back a project but is one of the most influential and crucial parts. They hope that these findings will inspire others to research the field and figure out why this happens exactly.

 

Reflection:

Overall I really enjoyed this article and the ideas it talked about as well as the way it discussed the particular phrases that caused certain reactions from people, be them positive or negative. I think that researching how the human mind works and what specifically draws our eye and makes us confident in something is extremely important knowledge that we need to know. The authors hope that other researchers will continue this investigation into why exactly we feel more confident when certain language is used is something that I strongly want to see as well. If we can not only understand what already makes use confident but why it does, we may be able to find new ways of conveying messages with positive outcomes and be able to better understand ourselves.

 

Questions:

• What other factors could influence us to be confident in something in other scenarios with more/other influences?
• Is there a limit to the amount of confidence language can give us?
• If it stands that types of language can make us more confident, can it make us less confident to the same extent or maybe even more?
• Would the level that language can affect us change if it is being read versus spoken directly to you?

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