Crowdfunding language still matters
Examining the structure of campaign text 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 phrase 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.
You may - or may not - recall from a previous post that a paper from 2014 identified several key attributes of words/phrases associated with successful crowdfunding campaigns.
The paper highlighted several keywords that could potentially harm your crowdfunding campaign, which has real-world implications for creators.
Yet in many ways, the use or avoidance of keywords isn’t always helpful. We tend to write sentences and paragraphs rather than lists of keywords; at least most of us do. So the next question we need to address is: does the literature tell us about the structure of text that could be associated with successful campaigns?
Fortunately, a recent master’s thesis from Camille Boland called “Analysis of the impact of lexical complexity on the outcome of crowdfunding campaigns,” goes some way to answering this question.
Definitions
The author performed four different regressions to analyze the impact of lexical complexity on crowdfunding success, specifically: total dollars pledged, number of backers, campaign duration, and campaign success.
Now what is lexical complexity, you ask? In this work, it was defined through three independent variables:
Lexical sophistication - basically a measure of the share of advanced, difficult, or rare words. It is a proxy measure of writing competence.
Lexical diversity - this is basically the range of the author's vocabulary and is related to the number of different words in a text.
Lexical density - this is a measure of the share of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the text.
Each of these individual variables comprises numerous sub-variables which are relevant to the analysis, but less so for our discussion. In addition to these three lexical variables, the author also examined the impacts of nine control variables such as the number of words in the project description, the number of words in the risks and challenges section, readability of the text, location, google trend etc.
Results
We present the results here for each of the four regressions:
Dollars pledged - project descriptions with more words were more likely to raise higher amounts, and similarly more text in the ‘risks and challenges’ section was associated with a higher funding total.
Backer number - improved readability was associated with higher backer number, i.e., text with a higher Fleisch Reading Ease score is more likely to attract more backers.
Duration - project descriptions with more words typically had a shorter campaign duration. However, campaigns with a longer ‘risks and challenges’ section were typically longer.
Success - project descriptions with more words were more likely to be successful. Moreover, creators who had previously launched projects were more likely to be funded, however the more optimism demonstrated by the creator - the less likely they were to be funded.
So what did we learn about the impact of lexical complexity? We review each of the three variables in turn.
Lexical sophistication - Highly significant and negatively correlated with success. This means that the more rare words you include in your text, the less likely you are to get funded.
Lexical diversity - This was positively correlated with success, and so the more diverse the range of words you can use to describe your project, the more likely you are to get funded. However, it was negatively correlated with total funding, backers, and duration, suggesting the campaigns may have been funded - but received less funding, had fewer backers, and were typically longer.
Lexical density - Strongly (positively) correlated with success, total funding, and backer count - but negatively correlated with duration.
What about some of the control variables?
About section - Sections with more words were (weakly) positively correlated with total funding, success, and backer number, but negatively correlated with duration.
Risks and challenges - Sections with more words were positively correlated with all four regression variables.
Text readability - Campaign text with a lower Fleisch Reading Ease score was more likely to be funded, have more backers, and more total funding. It was also negatively correlated with duration, so these campaigns ran longer.
Experience - Past success was positively correlated with campaign success, and to a lesser degree more backers and higher total funding received. It was weakly (negatively) correlated with duration, meaning more experienced creators ran longer campaigns.
Google trend - This was negatively correlated with campaign success, number of backers, and total funding, so the fewer times your project is searched for on Google, the better!
What does it all mean?
The results show that the lexical complexity of project descriptions does have an impact on the outcome of campaigns, but can both encourage and discourage backers. The most important of these for creators was lexical density, which was strongly correlated with success, total funding, and total number of backers - so using a large percentage of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the project text is clearly important for success.
Somewhat surprisingly, campaigns with more words (in both the project description and risks and challenges sections) were more likely to be successful. This may be connected to the readability of the text overall, as more words may mean less complex sentences, which would tend to lower the Fleish Reading Ease score. The lesson here is to make your campaign text easier to read if you want to succeed.
Past success was also associated with successful campaigns, which is not surprising, as this helps reduce risk in the eyes of the consumer. However, the Google trend finding was a surprise - as this was negatively associated with success. This would seem to go against traditional marketing and SEO advice, which encourages you to make sure everything is searchable by Google.
Overall, the findings are not too surprising for creators. Write as much text as you can but make it text easy to read and try to use a large share of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Hopefully that will help make your campaign more of a success!
The bottom line for creators is that we need to get better at writing simple text on our crowdfunding campaign pages. There are already too many distractions competing for backers attention, so large blocks of text and/or complex sentences make it easy for readers to click away.
This isn’t Earth-shattering news, but the devil is in the details. It’s not about being concise, but it is about being clear. Rambling on and on - in this case - may not be the worst thing you can do.
Until next time.
On a related note, I have a new Kickstarter project ready to launch in January 2024 called Sweet Delicious Candy. It’s a curated short horror story collection which I hope you’ll check out. Click on the button below to get notified when the campaign launches.