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?

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

 

Summary:

The paper studies only successful Kickstarter campaigns in an attempt to discover common features among them that may make crowdfunded projects successful. From all of these successful campaigns the author of the paper obtained around nine million unique phrases. The author then trimmed down this list of phrases to around twenty thousand by excluding all of the phrases that pertained to the specific product and all of the phrases with less than fifty occurrences. The author then analyzed these remaining phrases and separated them into six categories. Reciprocity, or giving a favor for a favor. Scarcity,  or how scarce the product is in either amount of products or amount of time. Social proof, or emphasizing that many other people have done the same thing.  Social identity, or making people feel like they’re part of a community.  Liking, basically just positive comments about the product and Authority, or getting the appeal of an expert. All of which are common ways to sell a product.

 

Reflection:

I think it’s pretty unsurprising that successful Kickstarter tactics turn out to mostly just be pre-existing and successful marketing or advertising tactics. The reciprocity aspect may be a little higher for crowdfunded projects as a crowdfunded project pitch is somewhat of a combination between a pitch to consumers and a pitch to investors. It’s akin to a pitch to investors as you don’t actively have the product but you promise that if they invest a product like what you describe will become available and they get some sort of benefit for investing. However, it’s also like an advertisement to consumers because it’s made to a very large audience of average Joes in the hopes of attracting as many people as possible and may use emotional arguments to sell rather than to a small board of professionals who invest for a living and will require a much more logical, numbers based argument to convince them they’ll get their money back.

 

Questions:

• Do you think crowdfunded project pitches more closely resemble advertisements or investor pitches?
• How much impact do you think the pitch itself has on success compared to the promise of the product?
• How do silly crowdfunded projects like “Potato Salad” become successful?

 

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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:

1. Reciprocity: returning a favor after receiving one
2. Scarcity: emphasizing that the product is limited (quantity or duration)
3. Social proof: emphasizing that many other people have done xyz, which increases the likelihood of others following and doing the same
4. Social identity: emphasizing that the user is part of the community
5. Liking: complying with a person/product if the user likes them; liking is increased when positive comments are explicitly given about the person/product
6. 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:

1. Reciprocity: backers receive the product if they help fund the project
2. Scarcity: backers receive the product at a discount (which is only given to backers) for a limited time
3. 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?

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Summary

The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter”, goes into details of researching what makes crowdsourced projects successfully funded. A key things that they noticed were language in how the project is pitched. They studied how certain phrases and words created a better platform for people to support projects. They also noticed that certain controls helped as well like the project goal, duration, etc.; however, the major reason did narrow down to the phrases used in the pitch. The way things are worded helps people feel more inclined to donate and support the project.

Reflection

From this article, I want to apply how we deliver our project pitch to gain as many supporters as possible. I want people to see our product and believe it is something meaningful and helpful to society. Our group will use this article to gain knowledge on what phrases work and which do not to gain more supporters. This may not help us financially because our project does not need financial help but rather support of people thinking it is a program that will benefit them.

Questions

• Which phrases worked better than other phrases?
• Do phrases help gain support even for not crowd funding but just crowd support?
• What controls will be applied to our program?

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Summary

This paper details the research into different aspects of crowdfunding, especially kickstarter.  They specifically looked at the dynamics of crowdfunding, analyzing text for social information,  and theories of persuasion.  When analyzing and looking at data, the research team had to pay close attention to key words within certain categories that could skew the analysis of which phrases cause more crowd support.  For example, words like “menu” and “game credits” were much more common in the “Food” and “Games” respectively.  The researchers displayed different words and phrases found in descriptions for kickstarter pages and how they correlate with those pages meeting their financial goals.  They found that the phrases “we have chosen”, “got you”, and “and encouragement” were found to help a kickstarter page and the phrases “provide us”, “need one”, and “not be able” tend to hurt the chances that a kickstarter won’t be successful.

Reflection

I never thought this would be as interesting of a topic as it turned out to be.  This study makes me wonder if similar studies can be done on other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.  Especially with YouTube descriptions, to see if the views on the channel increase or decrease from the normal amount based on the video description and tags.  Something similar could be done with twitter hashtags and tumblr tags.   Some other future research I would add onto this would be studying which types of kickstarters (in which categories) are the most successful, and what keywords help those to be even more successful.  I don’t think this specifically will add to the current research done on this topic, but I found the following video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oStLD-yYAy0  (it discusses kickstarter projects and their likelihood to be successful as well as general background information on how kickstarter works.)

Questions

• What additional work can be done in this area?
• How can similar studies be applied to other social media sites?
• How can the information from this video be used in future research?
• How do websites like indigogo and gofundme compare with kickstarter?
• Could similar studies be done on these other sites? Would they wield the same results?

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Summary

In the paper, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter”, the authors seek to identify the successful features of a crowdfunding project. They wisely observed that not just any data from Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website they performed their analysis on, could be used to draw conclusions. They needed to grab a subset of projects and posts on Kickstarter, specifically projects that reached their end date. From this list of projects, they were able to pull a little over nine million unique phrases. Then from these phrases they eliminated any phrase that was used less than 50 times or was topic specific. This left them with about twenty thousand phrases to work with and aid in drawing their conclusions from.

After analyzing these phrases and control variables that were determined against successful and non-successful Kickstarter projects, the authors were able to find some interesting results. They found that the “top 100 predictors of funded and not funded are solely comprised of phrases” and not control variables among other findings. Along with this, the implications of this research and data that will be released are discussed. It is very possible that crowdfunding websites could provide these most popular successful predicting phrases in some location on the website. Whatever the case, this research deepens our understanding of funded and not funded crowdfunding campaigns as well as persuasive design.

Reflection

I found this paper to be very informative concerning the phrases and variables that can be used to predict crowdfunding success or not. I was slightly surprised that some phrases in general seemed to be a much greater predictor of success than control variables. I also noted that there is much more significance placed on crowdfunding descriptions than I had originally thought.

The idea of reciprocity, as was mentioned, can play a huge role in crowdfunding success. From my own personal experience, I find it much more compelling to contribute something I own when I feel like I am receiving something in return. While this “trade” may be greatly skewed to one side, the idea of making a trade seems like a logical decision and gives us greater ease.

I like how this paper recognized that certain conditions cannot be accounted for when analyzing their data. They recognized that people who provide updates on their Kickstarter page and list their new backers may have a small influence on them reaching their project goal. They acknowledged this limitation, and I find this to be crucial for academic papers that seek to see future research done in the area.

Questions

Are the factors that identify a successful crowdfunding project changing as they become more well-known?

How important is reciprocity in the workplace in terms of effort expended and praise given? How does this affect employee retention?

Can the excessive use of a successful predicting phrase have the opposite effect?

How does the layout of a particular crowdfunding website affect a person’s desire to contribute? Does a more professional layout entice different subsets of people?

 

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Summary

The article dives into a new funding resource that many individuals and enterprises have used to achieve funding goals: crowdfunding. It specifically looks into the Kickstarter website.
After explaining what exactly kickstarted does and how it works, they go into analytical processing of what works create a successful funding vs not successful, in kickstarter if you achieve you goal you get the money, if not, you don’t get the funding money. The main trend they found is the language that was used to describe the campaign was a predictive factor related to the success of the campaign.

 

Some of these persuasive language elements were reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, relationship (linking) to the host, and authority. Most of these did not come as a surprise if you think about a verbal persuasive argument and what makes that successful: offering someone in return for their donating (reciprocity), giving them a time or product constraint (scarcity), showing that other people are donating(social proof), a feeling of belonging to a group that is donating (social identity), knowing the person and liking them (linking), and expert opinions on product donating for (authority). All of the data gather was from multiple statistical analysis and some other interesting things were find. At a enterprise  level, creating a crowdfund lead to more collaborations between departments creating a concern for a collective group instead of there own self interests.

 

Personal Reflection

The data gathered was quite similar to what I would have predicted if I studied persuasive arguments in a verbal context, which is interesting that it has the same effect online. I am not interesting in crowdfunding and gathering more data on it, but I do find the way words and social behavior online can affect a users decisions to do or not do something interesting. I found that how they analyzed words and their meaning within them would be applicable for an extension to Tweetasaurus, in being able to analyze the context of the sentence or emotion behind it and then offer better suggestions based on this emotion. Additionally, can any of these persuasion techniques be used to help users of Twetasusaurs encouraged to use it for its better purpose than just a thesaurus? Such as, being able to see other’s changing negative words to better word to create this “social” environment of “social proof”.   

 

Questions

How much does the wording matter? This analyzed the meaning of the wording, but say if someone was trying to appeal to someone’s social identity, but they did so in an ineffective way? Is there a way to measure if they users are “trying” be embody these characteristics, but failing?

 

I found it interesting that it brought people together at enterprise level, is there a way to see if there were any other improvements in the workplace?

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