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?
