The study explores how language usage and context on a site like Kickstarter can influence whether or not a project gets funded. The researchers used Beautiful Soup, a widely used scraper, to pull down all the text. Afterwards, they tokenized the words into unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams and then trimmed it down even more by removing certain phrases and words so that their model wouldn’t account for the scarce outliers. Outliers in this context were words or phrases that may be only relevant in certain subjects such as “game credits” or “our menu”. The words were then categorized into six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and social identity, linking, and authority. Apart from their findings, such as explicitly labeling certain phrases with projects that get funded vs phrases with projects that don’t, one of their suggestion is to perhaps create a FAQ or “Help Center” which can be of aid to the project developers as it’ll help them select words associated with successful pitches.

 

I’d be interested to see in more detail, an analysis of language usage within successful funded projects vs unsuccessful funded projects. Just because a project was funded does not mean that it was successful. This kind of study would be more to the benefit for the people that fund projects but its long term effects would be that it could help these folks perhaps use their money wisely when deciding to fund a project. Additionally, the methodology and approach used here can help my group’s project as we’re trying to identify which words or phrases are more frequently used in fake news, as oppose to reliable sources.

 

Do we find the same results of successful/unsuccessful phrases if this was done in a different language e.g. Spanish?

Does a high usage of good or bad phrases have the opposite effect?

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

Authors: Tanushree Mitra, Eric Gilbert

Summary

Mitra and Gilbert discuss the general subject, and prior research on crowd funding before elaborating on their own work. Crowd funding is when a business or project proposal uses a website to seek start up funds. Kickstarter is one such website and it does not finalize any monetary pledges until it the funding goal is met, by a deadline. Restricting their list to projects since July 2012 that were past their fund date, the authors had 45, 810 projects in their dataset. They used BeautifulSoup to scrap the html of these projects and followed a conventional bag of words model focusing on relatively common English words. Their model had over 20,000 phrases to use as predictive features.

After making their model, they used penalized logistic regression, which guards against co-linearity and sparsity by moving the co-linear coefficient’s weight to the most predictive feature. cv.glmnet, is the R implementation of this method that they used, because it also handles sparsity. Both sparsity and co-linearity were present in their data.

Their results are beautifully displayed in a figure with two phrase trees. One is of “funded” phrases that started with “pledgers will [receive, be, also, have, …]”. The other is of “not funded” phrases that started with “even a dollar [short, will, can, helps, …]”. The “funded” phrases showed man common elements, such as reciprocity (the tendency to return a favor after receiving one), and scarcity (limited supply of rare or distinct products that hold more value to pledgers).

Reflection

This makes me want to “hack” Kickstarter and make a fortune.

I read this one carefully because some of the tools and methods that the authors used are analogous to what my team would probably have to use on our project. It is interesting that the results break down into reciprocity and “money groveling”, respectively, as very strong positive and negative indicators of achieving funding. It is not especially surprising though, because it shows that pledgers have their own self interest in mind even when they are donating.

Certain markets might succeed much better in crowd funding that others. The target market has to a) have access to the internet and b) have enough extra money to bother looking at Kickstarter and c) have the time and means and interest to make use of any Kickstarter product. The successful pledge earning language in those already niche markets could be pretty different for each of the categories and sub-categories. It would be interesting to run a similar sub-analysis within the sub-markets. The authors poked into this by adding control variables, but it would be interesting to dig deeper.

Questions

Are there penalties for “over promising?” That is, if a project achieves a funding goal, it receives the funds. What if a founders of a project just kept the money and didn’t deliver anything?

Whatever happened to Ninja Baseball? That sounds awesome.

Bringing the qualitative to the quantitative is always a pain. How reliable are sentiment analysis tools? Can they be used to detect opinion?

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Summary

The study ‘The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” seeks to understand the effects social communication can have on a kickstarter’s ability to pull in donations at faster rates. The study utilized scraping software to analyze over 45,000 crowdfunded projects from Kickstarter.com, over 9,000,000 phrases, and a multitude of other variables. Some key factors that the study concluded as correlating to increased donations include:

• Reciprocity: Patrons are more likely to respond to a project if they believe that they will receive something in return for their donation.
• Scarcity: People place higher value on products they believe to be limited in quantity or exclusive to a certain group of people (typically those who donate above a threshold).
• Social Proof: Users are more likely to follow in the footsteps of previous donors who received recognition and/or praise for their participation in the crowdfunding.
• Social Identity: People respond to a sense of belonging, especially if it is to a group they already identify with. In order to further perpetuate their sense of belonging, they will donate to validate their presence within the community.
• Liking: Fairly straightforward, a product or a person behind a project will achieve greater success if it/they are well-liked.
• Authority: Greater attention will be given to a project where an authority figure is present (i.e. a film based project involving a fairly well-know or well-respected director).
• Sentiment: People are more likely to respond to a project that provides them with a deeper emotional reaction (positive or negative).

 

Reflection

            It makes sense that the above listed factors should influence people’s decision making process online since they are fairly reliable ways of influencing people in the physical world. The concepts of reciprocity and scarcity are seen all the time in marketing and commercials for products (“buy within the next 10 minutes and get a second one free”). Social proof, social identity, and liking is apparent when products point out how past users had positive experiences. Authority can be seen in celebrity endorsements such as having famous actresses in make-up commercials. Sentiment is apparent in television based donation-seeking commercials such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s (in)famous one involving images of sad animals displayed over the song ‘Arms of an Angel’. Even the negative phrases have a logical point, such as the phrase “even a dollar” allowing users to get away with giving sparse amounts of money rather than encouraging large donations through more positive reinforcement. The data mining techniques the study used were also very interesting as they give me a lot of ideas about how they can be applied to our semester project. Seeing a study where R was utilized to a more advanced degree than we observed in class was also a distinguishing tie-in.

 

Questions

• How greatly can phrases with equivalent meaning but different wording impact success? For example, two phrases that offer the same level of reciprocity but with different phrasing.
• How much does pop culture benefit/hinder the area of ‘social identity’? How much can too much specialization into a certain group of people hurt a kickstarter’s ability to attract donations or attention?
• Can this research be applied to sites not involved with crowdfunding (such as a regular social media site or a blog’s ability to attract fans)?
• Where can we see crowdfunding marketing evolving given this data?
• People often read the comments of a kickstarter to get a feel for it? How can the presence of comments be added to this study to provide greater range of perspective?

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Summary

The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is about a crowdfunding site “Kickstarter”, and the factors that lead to success on the site. The paper begins with a description of how crowdfunding websites are becoming increasingly popular, It is argued that the specific language used generates roughly around 58% of success funding the project. Research to test this theory was done on a corpus of 45K Kickstarter projects analyzing duration, project goal amount, presence of a video, and language. Out of 9 million phrases, 20,000 phrases were studied and analyzed. It is believed that knowing these specific phrases can help sites improve in the future. Six categories were developed to understand the effects of persuasion on users. Reciprocity argues that people tend to return a favor after receiving one. Scarcity means people attach more value to products if they are hard to come by. Social proof is people tend to rely on others to decide how to act, while social identity is a person’s knowledge that he or she belongs to a social group. This social group is usually established among individuals with common interests or beliefs. Liking is the idea that people are more likely to comply with another person if they like them. Lastly, authority argues that people often resort to expert opinions for making decisions. Other characteristics that have an effect on the success of the funding are social progress, emotion, cogitative thinking, personal concerns and perception rates. All of these ideas go into how a product sells, and whether or not people will invest in them.

Reflection

After reading this article, I am more aware of how our language changes people’s perceptions about products. It is very powerful and can make or break a project. Personally I had never heard of the website Kickstarter before, but am intrigued to look into donating through the site. The idea that different phrases effect the way people react to products is extraordinary. It makes me think about previous products that I have purchased, and whether or not these persuasion techniques were used on me. Although, there were many words that were tagged as negative predictors that did not come across to me that way. Phrases such as “new form of”, “information at”, and “models of” are words I personally would have used in a Kickstarter post. It would be interesting to see how many Kickstarter users actually research the phrases that they use in their posts, whether it be related to reciprocity, scarcity or authority. I think the idea of reciprocity is a large contributing factor to whether or not people donate to the project. Most people I know will only contribute to something if they are going to get something in return. If users are persuaded into believing this product is something that will benefit them, then they are more likely to volunteer. I think that if more inventors and entrepreneurs knew about this type of research, they would be much more successful raising money.

Questions

Can this research be applied to other types of websites? (Social media, news articles, blogs, etc.)

What websites already apply this type of work?

What percentage of people posting on Kickstarter actually research their vocabulary before posting?

How does Kickstarter’s competition differ?

Is Kickstarter failing in any aspect that others are succeeding on? Does this have to do with user’s language?

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Summary:

The article, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is a very interesting and intriguing article. It aims to look at what are the factors that lead to people who view a Kickstarter campaign, ultimately backing it in the long run. The authors took a sample of 45 thousand Kickstarted campaign and closely studied the effect that 20 thousand phrases had on the impact of a person either back or not backing the campaign. Kickstarter is a platform that allows companies or individuals to start and idea/product and share that idea with a goal in mind with the public. The creator sets a monetary goal of donations that must be reached before the money is then given to the creator to go and make the product they promised to make. If the monetary goal is not reached then the money is refunded to the contributors and the project is not funded. Because of this fact, it is very important that the creator(s) do a very good job in selling the contributors the idea of their product and make you want to buy it. Creators tend to use categories such as presentation of product and idea, goal amount, duration until goal would be reached, and a few others. But this paper focuses on the language used by creators that they hope will help sell their idea/product. The language used was broken up into six categories, authority, scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, liking, and social identity. Through the authors research and analysis they were surprised to find that language is not only a key player in getting a contributor to back a project but is one of the most influential and crucial parts. They hope that these findings will inspire others to research the field and figure out why this happens exactly.

 

Reflection:

Overall I really enjoyed this article and the ideas it talked about as well as the way it discussed the particular phrases that caused certain reactions from people, be them positive or negative. I think that researching how the human mind works and what specifically draws our eye and makes us confident in something is extremely important knowledge that we need to know. The authors hope that other researchers will continue this investigation into why exactly we feel more confident when certain language is used is something that I strongly want to see as well. If we can not only understand what already makes use confident but why it does, we may be able to find new ways of conveying messages with positive outcomes and be able to better understand ourselves.

 

Questions:

• What other factors could influence us to be confident in something in other scenarios with more/other influences?
• Is there a limit to the amount of confidence language can give us?
• If it stands that types of language can make us more confident, can it make us less confident to the same extent or maybe even more?
• Would the level that language can affect us change if it is being read versus spoken directly to you?

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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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