The Right Time for Crowd Communication during Campaigns for Sustainable Success of Crowdfunding: Evidence from Kickstarter Platform

Abstract

Only a small percentage of crowdfunding projects succeed in securing funds, the fact of which puts the sustainability of crowdfunding platforms at risk. Researchers have examined the influences of phased aspects of communication, drawn from updates and comments, on success of crowdfunding campaigns, but in most cases they have focused on the combined effects of the aspects. This paper investigated campaign success contribution of various combinations of phased communication aspects from updates and comments, the best of which can help creators to successfully manage campaigns by focusing on the important communication aspects. Metaheuristic and machine learning algorithms were used to search and evaluate the best combination of phased communication aspects for predicting success using Kickstarter dataset. The study found that the number of updates in phase one, the polarity of comments in phase two, readability of updates and polarity of comments in phase three, and the polarity of comments in phase five are the most important communication aspects in predicting campaign success. Moreover, the success prediction accuracy with the aspects identified after phasing is more than the baseline model without phasing. Our findings can help crowdfunding actors to focus on the important communication aspects leading to improved likelihood of success.