Summary
“The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” discusses the factors that allow Kickstarter projects to be funded by a “crowd.” Kickstarter is a crowd funding website where backers (users in the “crowd”) can fund a project in order to help the project achieve its goal. If the goal is achieved, the project or product will be created, else the project fails and the money is returned to the backers. The major attributes that help projects be funded include project duration, goal amount, language, and video present/length. In particular, the authors discuss the language that project creators can use to engage backers, which was determined via scraping data from a sample of Kickstarter projects, such as project description and reward details. The phrases found were then analyzed with LIWC in order to categorize the types of words found. Differences between the phrases used in funded and nonfunded projects were observed, and the following categories were established:
- Reciprocity: returning a favor after receiving one
- Scarcity: emphasizing that the product is limited (quantity or duration)
- Social proof: emphasizing that many other people have done xyz, which increases the likelihood of others following and doing the same
- Social identity: emphasizing that the user is part of the community
- Liking: complying with a person/product if the user likes them; liking is increased when positive comments are explicitly given about the person/product
- Authority: including expert-given opinions
It was also found that characteristics of the funded projects include cognitive thinking, social process, perception rates, emotion, and personal concerns. The authors suggest creating an FAQ or Help Center that gives creators tips on having a successfully funded project (although use of the phrases may not guarantee success).
Reflection
I found this paper really interesting because I’ve participated in a Kickstarter project before (for a product that definitely is not too cheap) and the factors that made me interested were:
- Reciprocity: backers receive the product if they help fund the project
- Scarcity: backers receive the product at a discount (which is only given to backers) for a limited time
- Social proof: there were so many other backers for the project
I’m sure this has been done before, but I think it would be really interesting to apply this to clickbait (articles, Youtube videos, etc.) to see if there are specific phrases that make people read them. I think it would be a little difficult to categorize phrases involved in clickbait, however, because it seems that article titles and Youtube video titles can vary more vastly than phrases used in Kickstarter projects (though I could be wrong), and also because titles are much shorter than the data scraped from Kickstarter projects. In this case, I think that clickbait is more dependent on categories of specific words or adjectives rather than whole phrases (which could be determined via LIWC). Nevertheless, it would be intriguing to see which categories these words would fall under.
Questions
- Would an analysis on other crowd funding sites (e.g. gofundme) result in the same results?
- How many phrases in the funded and nonfunded categories overlapped?
