Summary:
In the paper “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter,” the authors look into the power of phrases and words to encourage users to users to donate and use them as an indicator for the likelihood of a project being funded or not. They mainly focus on the language used in the project pitch but factor in other variables such as amount requested and timeline for the project. However even with the inclusion of other variables they found that the top 100 predictors were still phrases. The phrases were also classified into 13 overall categories: art, music, publishing, design, film and video, tech, dance, theater, photography, food, games, fashion, and comics. Each had respective sub-categories and the phrases were analyzed to see if they were exclusive to a single category since those would be useless and skew results. A lot of what the paper also found supported my experiences as well. Users love getting something in return and a lot of kickstarters will offer “limited editions” or “exclusive” items in return for reaching certain levels of donation. This is actually added to another grouping of categories: Reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, liking, and authority. All of which are widely used tactics in selling things to people
Reflections:
I will start by saying that throughout the paper I was wondering if I could take advantage of these phrases to try and get myself funded for something but then I realized that these are just indicators. I did take not of a lot of the analysis that went on in the paper, more so than previous ones. This one actually had very descriptive explanations of what each analysis was doing and how they worked. So not only was it informative from a research standpoint but I found it to be very useful from a student one as well. I’m not sure how much the words really do play a part though. I feel like personal interest is the biggest deciding factor and people are often willing to invest more in things that they like. So within six categories of persuasion was the information skewed towards one category over the others in statistically significant way? This article was still very interesting. We really do take everything for granted when the time and consideration people put into wordsmithing could easily be worth it.
Questions:
- Do these phrases hold true across all donation/crowdfunding sites?
- Do identical phrases using synonyms have the same impact?
- Inclusion of stretch goals and updates didn’t seem to be included but if they were to be would they have any appreciable impact?
- Do these phrases have any implications for advertising in real life? Could they affect in-person donation drives?
- Would this study be more useful if they were able to take into account all donations and how much each was for?
