Examining the Effects of Vocabulary on Crowdfunding Success: A Comparison of Cultural and Commercial Campaigns

Crowdfunding has emerged as an important financing source for diverse cultural projects and commercial ventures in the early stages. Unlike traditional investment evaluation, where structured financial data is critical, such information is typically unavailable for crowdfunding campaigns. Instead, campaign creators prepare pitches containing essential information about themselves and the campaigns, which are crucial in attracting and persuading contributors. Prior literature has examined the effects of different aspects in campaign pitches, but a comprehensive understanding of the theme is lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by identifying the lexicon of frequently used vocabulary in campaign pitches and examining how they are associated with crowdfunding success. Moreover, we examine how the association differs between culture and commercial crowdfunding campaigns. We randomly collected 50,000 campaigns from the cultural and commercial categories on Kickstarter and extracted the 100 most used verbs in the campaign pitches. Based on a machine learning approach combined with principal component analysis, we constructed sets of verbal factors statistically significant in predicting crowdfunding success. The findings also show that cultural and commercial campaigns consist of different verbal components with different effects on crowdfunding success.