Elements of an Emergent Style Guide for Kickstarter (original) (raw)
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A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Exploration of a Crowdfunding Entrepreneurial Pitch
2017
This paper explores multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) as a methodology to address the research question: How are environmentally conscious entrepreneurial ventures constituted in online investment crowd-funding pitches and the communications that surround them? While discourse may be realised in many different ways (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001 p.5, Bezemer and Jewit, 2010), multimodal discourse analysis focuses on analysing and describing a repertoire of meaning making resources which individuals use in various contexts (visual, gestural, written, actional etc.). Broadband internet and associated technologies mean that these crowdfunding pitches and many other genres tend to be much richer in the modes of communication than was traditionally the case in business. This paper explores one environmentally conscious crowdfunding entrepreneurial pitch "Solar Roadways". The focus of multimodality analysis will be on the process of meaning making to understand how this venture is constituted in an online crowdfunding pitch using a variety of modes such as images, clothing, bodily decoration, music and speech. The aim of this paper is to argue for the usefulness of multimodal discourse analysis as a methodological tool with which to explore pitches designed for the crowdfunding audience. The findings suggest that visual and audible symbols within the video pitch create meaning making and can be linked to story-telling which can impact on the impressions made by the entrepreneur to potential funders. Employing a multimodal methodology demonstrates that language is not the only method of communication to potential contributors.
Project description and crowdfunding success: an exploratory study
Information systems frontiers : a journal of research and innovation, 2018
Existing research on antecedent of funding success mainly focuses on basic project properties such as funding goal, duration, and project category. In this study, we view the process by which project owners raise funds from backers as a persuasion process through project descriptions. Guided by the unimodel theory of persuasion, this study identifies three exemplary antecedents (length, readability, and tone) from the content of project descriptions and two antecedents (past experience and past expertise) from the trustworthy cue of project descriptions. We then investigate their impacts on funding success. Using data collected from Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding platform, we find that these antecedents are significantly associated with funding success. Empirical results show that the proposed model that incorporated these antecedents can achieve an accuracy of 73 % (70 % in F-measure). The result represents an improvement of roughly 14 percentage points over the baseline model...
Background: Entrepreneurship has undergone significant transformations in the past decade due to crowd-based models of innovation and the increasing popularity of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding provides an alternative to the way entrepreneurs traditionally raise start-up and operational funds for a venture. Moreover, with crowdfunding platforms, citizens and communities are increasingly able to engage in entrepreneurial work not only for profit but also to address social and civic problems. Problem: Given the expanding boundaries of entrepreneurship, it is increasingly important for professional and technical communication teachers to prepare students to be ethical entrepreneurs and embody a widening array of rhetorical skills. Our teaching case addresses the question of how we might incorporate new and emerging forms of entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding, into the professional and technical communication classroom in ways that foreground the social, civic, and ethical dimensions of that work. Situating the case: To address this question, we first situate our teaching case in relevant literature from professional and technical communication and social entrepreneurship, and then compare it with similar cases of crowdfunding being used for educational purposes. How the case was studied: We describe what we observed before, during, and after teaching a project structured thematically around civic crowdfunding. We had two sources of data: (1) a collection of teaching materials, including syllabi, day-today lesson plans, project prompts, in-class activities, correspondence between instructors, and informal teaching logs used to record impromptu reflections throughout the course of the semester; and (2) the civic crowdfunding project materials produced by students. About the case: Two distinct but related problems have motivated the development of this teaching case: (1) the context of 21st-century entrepreneurship has rapidly changed as a result of new approaches, including crowdfunding; (2) this shift has also led to an increased emphasis on civic and social matters of concern, which have increasingly become more important in contemporary business models. Ultimately, we seek to understand how entrepreneurial writing projects can meld commercial and financial motivations with civic exigencies, direct participation, and stakeholder engagement. As such, this civic crowdfunding sequence takes place over two phases: (1) students conducted primary and secondary research on a local problem or exigency and used this as evidence for a white paper and a project proposal; (2) students developed a feasible solution to this problem which then formed the basis for crowdfunding campaign materials, including a Kickstarter page, campaign video, and branding materials. Results: Our results focus on two projects that clearly foreground a social and civic mission; we point to these two projects not as perfect examples, but rather as illustrative cases of how students engaged crowdfunding as a form of civic entrepreneurship. Conclusions: Our teaching case has demonstrated the need to prepare students not only to pitch venture ideas for a small audience of investors, but also to consider how to identify and frame problems, construct stories about these problems as pressing matters of concern and, ultimately, develop ethical relationships with stakeholders and increasingly diverse investors.
2020
Charitable crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for people to seek help from the public. Yet, many charitable crowdfunding campaigns suffer from underfunding. Given that project description is the primary source of information for fundraisers to present their cause to prospective donors, the platform may preemptively assess the success rate of charitable crowdfunding campaigns based on the narrative elements embedded with such description. Furthermore, though prior research about narrative persuasion (i.e., storytelling) has alluded to generic mechanisms (i.e. identifiable character, imaginable plot, and verisimilitude) in eliciting empathic feeling, limited attention has been paid to scrutinizing the effects of narrative elements in driving donation behaviors in charitable crowdfunding. To this end, this study attempts to elucidate how linguistic cues embedded in the project narratives is associated with donation performance in charitable crowdfunding.
The Narrative Advantage: Gender and the Language of Crowdfunding
In this study, we set out to examine the role of language in the success of online fundraising-a new form of entrepreneurial project financing. In particular, we evaluate the influence of linguistic content on fundraising outcomes, above and beyond type of product or service offered.
Crowdfunding An exploratory research of campaign's important processes on Kickstarter
Crowdfunding: An exploratory research of campaign's important processes on Kickstarter, 2017
When starting a project or a campaign, it requires a certain amount of funding to execute it, to create a product and manage the stakeholders. Funds were usually acquired using loans from banks or investments. With the emerging new crowdfunding phenomenon which is an Internet-based concept, entrepreneurs or individual creators have an alternative way to seek funds for their projects. The selected, the most popular reward-based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter gives an opportunity to reach the crowd, potential funds providers, easier and more efficiently. However, to do that, project founders have to prepare a detailed action plan of how to pitch the idea, set rewards, promote and market the idea. This research paper serves to explore important processes when creating a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter platform. It shows an insight on what preparations need to be done before publishing a project campaign, how to manage it and finally how to execute it. Additionally, using several theoretical frameworks and concepts it seeks to explore the relationship between the founders and backers, and how their actions influence each other. By doing so, strategy to achieve a successful Kickstarter campaign was created.
This paper, which places itself within the field of Specialised Terminology, aims to give a general overview of the current state of crowdfunding terminology in the context of the European Union, by focusing on naming dynamics resulting into synchronic variation and short-term lexical change. Specifically, by adopting an onomasiological approach (Geeraerts 2002), the research aims to discuss how terminological choices through which crowdfunding-related concepts are conveyed by platforms to potential end-users at a relatively early stage of crowdfunding development can lead to ambiguity and hinder user engagement. To achieve the objectives of this study, the issue of terminological transparency is introduced by defining the concepts of variation and harmonisation; then, the concept of crowdfunding is outlined and the different models are roughly described; subsequently, crowdfunding-related concepts are identified and mapped in order to find the related terms in the corpus; finally, potential risks related to terminological variation are discussed in a terminological perspective by way of a pragmatic method (Geeraerts 2002). The corpus of analysis is comprised of terms extracted from the crowdfunding platforms registered to the European Crowdfunding Network.
A semantic analysis of crowdfunding in the digital press
The use of technology has helped to expand the availability of new forms of financing, as well as the development of fintech, among which crowdfunding has received an increasing amount of interest over the past few years. This study analyzes how the generalist digital press addresses crowdfunding and identifies the attributes linked to this phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach: The sample is defined in terms of a linguistic corpus that contains content related to crowdfunding drawn from the digital editions of the four most important Spanish newspapers from September 1996 to October 2020. Word association and co-occurrence analyses were carried out. Findings: The results reveal correspondence among social, academic and media patterns related to the crowdfunding phenomenon. This correspondence shows how attributes such as "project", "platform" or "investment" appear to be very relevant and are linked to different co-occurrence scenarios. The relevance of the crowdfunding platforms in the ecosystem is identified and analyzed, showing the importance of their specialization. The differences and similarities between the media discourse for the crowdfunding ecosystem and the entrepreneurial phenomenon are also identified. Originality: This study provides empirical evidence that helps to identify the ways in which the media approaches crowdfunding through analyses of media content rather than public perceptions or an academic approach to the phenomenon.
Effective entrepreneurial narrative design in reward crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journa, 2022
One of the most important challenges for social venture entrepreneurs is acquiring resources. Reward crowdfunding is considered a suitable tool for meeting the financing needs of social ventures, whose backers are particularly interested in firm ideas and core values rather than in collaterals or business plans. A strategic factor that is able to influence the outcome of crowdfunding campaigns is the entrepreneurial narrative. Very few scholars have examined the key factors that support a crowdfunding campaign, particularly those on reward-based crowdfunding platforms, and the effects of entrepreneurial narratives on investors' decisions. Aiming to fill this research gap, this paper investigates how entrepreneurs in the technology industry describe their social ventures and projects on Eppela, an Italian reward-based crowdfunding platform. Thematic analysis was applied to detect the five following key factors of effective entrepreneurial narratives in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns for social ventures: 1) problem/need; 2) project; 3) product; 4) team; and 5) venture. Each key factor includes specific subfactors. Lexical data analysis was then performed to identify the following expected effects of the examined entrepreneurial narratives on potential investors, leading these investors to understand, trust, and approve the project proposal, and thus, finance the social venture's project: 1) reassurance, 2) reliability, and 3) credibility. Based on these results, this study proposes an explanatory model about how to design effective entrepreneurial narratives to be presented to contribute as much as possible to the success of projects in crowdfunding platforms.
A Profile of and Prescription for Fixing The Broken Discourse of Fund Raising
This article summarizes the troubling findings uncovered in a corpus linguistics analysis of 1.5 million words of fund-raising discourse. These findings are troubling because they profile discourse patterns that run diametrically counter to the writing advice experts in the fields of direct response marketing and fund-raising have historically offered practitioners. Most of the organizations whose texts were evaluated raise at least $20 million annually in public support. Four aspects of the doctoral research this article is based on are reported here: 1.) the statistical procedures used to analyze texts, 2.) the profile of co-occurring linguistic features and rhetorical structures that emerged, 3.) the root problems underlying these profiles, and 4.) a prescription for improving fund-raising discourse by writing what I call the voice of philanthropy-the voice of the friend of man.