Summary
The journal article, The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter, focused on how language used in a Kickstarter project page effects its likelihood to get funded. Initially, we learn about what crowdfunding platforms are and how they are quickly growing more popular. People use crowdfunding to achieve goals that require money by acquiring the necessary funds from members of the public who believe in the project and want to see it become a success. The most popular crowdfunding platform is Kickstarter and is thus the focus of the study. The researchers looked at 45,000 different projects and analyzed 20,000 phrases to get their data. There were a few technologies used to acquire the data, Beautiful Soup, a Python web scraping library was used to scrape the content off of the site, which was then searched for stop words. Initially the researchers found over 9 million common phrases on all the project pages, but after sifting through and getting only the general ones, they were left with just twenty thousand phrases. LIWC was another technology used after the phrases were acquired, it is a text analysis technique that uses a dictionary of words, placed into various categories associated with those words. This was used to better analyze the phrases. At the end, the researchers had a list of phrases and an associated score that could be positive or negative depending on whether the phrase is associated with the project being successfully funded. By analyzing this list the researchers found a few categories and explanations for why phrases had certain effects. For example, phrases that indicate reciprocity have a positive effect because the backer feels they will be rewarded. On the other hand, phrases that lack assurance of success, typically led to projects not getting funded.
Reflection
I found the article to be an interesting read, as it brings light to the fact that language is powerful and can either help or hinder you. That is why it is important to think carefully about things like word choice and diction, especially in the situation where you are asking the public for money. I think the positive phrases made sense to me and the article did an excellent job explaining why these positive phrases were successful. However, I was quite confused and surprised by some of the negative phrases. I understand why phrases like, “even a dollar” and “honorable mention” were negative because they imply that there is no reward for backing, which is bad when people expect reciprocity. On the other hand phrases like “underway” and “will soon” are also negative, even though they imply that progress has already begun or is about to begin, which I would think should inspire confidence in the potential backer. I also liked seeing how powerful these language and parsing tools like LIWC and Google IT really are. They seem to be really effective and great for data analysis, which is good news, especially because my group intends to use LIWC in our project. It also seems like there is a lot of potential to further study crowdfunding platforms, a lot of the projects I hear about on there usually turn out to be disasters even after they get funded, this leads to a lot of angry backers and warrants more research in trying to prevent this.
Questions
How do different crowdfunding platforms, like Indiegogo (which does not use the all or nothing model), work differently than Kickstarter? Do they have different communities? Different types of projects?
How susceptible are backers to word choice vs. reciprocity? In other words, would a backer still back a poorly written proposal if the rewards were good enough?
