Crowdfunding language matters
Examining the words and phrases associated with successful campaigns on Kickstarter.
Do you get tongue-tied when it comes to selling and marketing your creation? Wish there was a magic word that would help get your Kickstarter funded? This article will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to writing your Crowdfunding text.
As a writer, I know words matter. The choice of a specific word or phrase can make the difference between a reader switching off or a reader leaning in. The same is true of marketing, of course, but for some reason when it comes to marketing my own books I find myself at a loss for words.
This happens most often when I’m writing the project information page for my Kickstarter campaigns. It’s really the centre-piece of the entire campaign, where I get to talk directly to the audience about what the book is about, what it means, and why you should back it. And I do know all these answers (it’s my book, after all), but each time I sit down to write this section, I find myself struggling with doubt and insecurity: am I effectively conveying the message? Am I including enough images? Am I selling the themes clearly? Is my tone positive without being too positive?1
The internet is full of articles and opinions about how to more effectively position and sell your creative wares, but I was curious about what the scientific literature had to say on the subject: specifically in the context of Crowdfunding.
After a quick search, I came upon this interesting paper from 2014 that set out to examine phrases that could be predictors of success on Kickstarter. The paper examines a dataset scraped from Kickstarter back in 2012, but I still think their findings are informative.
The methods are quite clearly spelled out in the paper, so I won’t repeat them here. The key points to note, however, were their desire to identify general English text and phrases used in the 45,815 projects they examined, and thus eliminate any specific project category text/phrases. This of course helps reduce their data from over nine million unique phrases down to a much more manageable 20,391 phrases, but also ensures they are focused on the writing and language. Additionally, they examined the impact of a set of 59 other variables, which were mostly categories/sub categories alongside control variables such as project goal, project duration, video present etc.
Using a specialized logistic regression, they sought to understand which of the variables and phrases were more strongly associated with a campaign being funded. As a reminder, this is correlation, not causation. They compared a model using only controls to one using controls and phrases, and found the latter was more predictive. Moreover, they were able to calculate the weights of each of the phrases to identify those more strongly associated with successful campaigns and those more strongly associated with unsuccessful campaigns.
What are the magic words?
The diagrams below are taken from the paper and show the phrases associated with successful campaigns (the size of the words represent the frequency of occurrence).
While the words/phrases in the image below are associated with unsuccessful campaigns.
What immediately struck me was the fact I had used phrases from both lists in my own campaigns - which were all successful. Rather than getting bogged down in the specifics of the words (see table 3 and 4 in their paper), I actually found it more instructive to read their synthesized findings, which focused on the attributes of the phrases.
Reciprocity was identified as a key attribute for successful campaigns, with their examples including “everyone who had pledged will receive…” which are fairly typical for comics Kickstarters. However, the reciprocity needed to have perceived value otherwise it could lead to rejection, for example the term “dressed up” was one of the top phrases for unsuccessful projects. They also found the unusual term “Good karma” was also associated with success - so maybe you should consider sprinkling that in your future campaign text.
Scarcity was also a key attribute, which makes intuitive sense because people are often attracted to rare or unique projects, as there is an air of exclusivity.
Other attributes for success were identified as:
Social proof - the idea that people depend on others for cues on how to act.
Social identity - an individual’s knowledge that they belong to a social group in which individuals have common attributes.
Liking - people are more likely to comply with a person/product if they like them, and positive remarks about other people tends to increase liking.
Authority - people often resort to expert opinions for expedient decisions.
What does it all mean?
The study is almost a decade old and also covers a disparate group of categories on Kickstarter, but as a comic creator, I still found it useful.
The notion of reciprocity is often clear in the campaign, but if not - then probably should be. Scarcity was an interesting area for me, and one I explored on my last campaign by offering a variant cover for a limited-time. I would probably try something like that again in future to see what happens.
Social proofing is a key attribute and one I don’t do enough of - examples could include comments from other creators on the campaign page, and also in regular updates to the wider audience. For social identity, this likely arises from targeting the core audience for your campaign, perhaps through the use of comps e.g., this book is a must-have for fans of X, Y, and Z (of course using such a direct approach may alienate those who don’t like your comps, so that’s something to bear in mind).
Finally, it obviously goes without saying that you should be positive and authoritative about your own campaign, and thankful to backers - but doing this more publicly may be beneficial! Hopefully this will give you some ideas about what words/phrases to consider using for your next successful campaign.
Of course, just using these keywords and phrases isn’t helpful on its own. We need to consider the text in its entirety, and that will be the subject for another post.
If you want to check out my comics and other stories, just click here!
Recall from the literature that too much positivity can be off-putting for backers. See Zhou MJ, Lu B, Fan WP, Wang GA. Project description and crowdfunding success: an exploratory study. Inf Syst Front. 2018;20(2):259-274. doi: 10.1007/s10796-016-9723-1. Epub 2016 Dec 7. PMID: 29755287; PMCID: PMC5935031.
You’re welcome. Hope it was useful!
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