Joanna Adamska-Mieruszewska

University of Gdańsk,

Gdańsk, Poland

E-mail: joanna.adamska-mieruszewska@ug.edu.pl

ORCID 0000-0002-8138-4004

Keep it simple. The impact of language on crowdfunding success

Urszula Mrzygłód

University of Gdańsk,

Gdańsk, Poland

E-mail: urszula.mrzyglod@ug.edu.pl

ORCID 0000-0003-4130-1494

Michał Suchanek

University of Gdańsk,

Gdańsk, Poland

E-mail: michal.suchanek@ug.edu.pl

ORCID 0000-0003-3506-6686

Anna Fornalska-Skurczyńska

FH Krems,

Krems, Austria

E-mail: anna.fornalska@fh-krems.ac.at

ORCID 0000-0003-3066-2542

Abstract. The success of a crowdfunding campaign depends on obtaining funds provided by the online community. More precisely, the success of a campaign is defined as achieving its financial goal built upon convincing a relatively large number of people in a fundraiser’s idea. Thus, efficient communication with “the crowd” is necessary to obtain its expected positive attitude change. In this respect, we argue that beyond the standard campaign features such as the number of supporters, the financing goal and the campaign duration, project’s description becomes critical for a campaign’s success. The goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the readability, the length of a description and the funding success of a campaign in the reward-based crowdfunding model. Along with standard statistical measures, we conduct logit regression on the dataset comprising over 2800 projects published on one of the largest Polish crowdfunding platforms. Our results provide evidence that both description’s length and text readability significantly influence the fundraising outcome. We interpret these results in the light of the persuasion effects as a longer text encompasses a higher number of arguments. Furthermore, a more detailed description decreases information asymmetry between the crowd and the project's author as well as induces the level of trust towards the latter. Finally, although the readability level of campaigns’ descriptions in our sample is moderate, still the projects with a clearer description are preferred by the online community.

Received: February, 2020

1st Revision: June, 2020

Accepted: March, 2021

DOI: 10.14254/2071-789X.2021/14-1/9

JEL Classification: D26, G41, L21, L26, L31

Keywords: crowdfunding, text readability, crowdfunding campaign, success determinants, Poland