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?
