Discovering Critical Factors in the Content of Crowdfunding Projects

Abstract

Crowdfunding can simplify the financing process to raise large amounts of money to complete projects for startups. However, improving the success rate has become one of critical issues. To achieve this goal, fundraisers need to create a short video, attractive promotional content, and present themselves on social media to attract investors. Previous studies merely discussed project factors that affect crowdfunding success rates. However, from the available literature, relatively few studies have studied what elements should be involved in the project content for the success of crowdfunding projects. Consequently, this study aims to extract the crucial factors that can enhance the crowdfunding project success rate based on the project content description. To identify the crucial project content factors of movie projects, this study employed two real cases from famous platforms by using natural language processing (NLP) and feature selection algorithms including rough set theory (RST), decision trees (DT), and ReliefF, from 12 pre-defined candidate factors. Then, support vector machines (SVM) were used to evaluate the performance. Finally, “Role”, “Cast”, “Merchandise”, “Sound effects”, and “Sentiment” were identified as important content factors for movie projects. The findings also could provide fundraisers with suggestions on how to make their movie crowdfunding projects more successful.