Will a digital camera cure your sick puppy? Modality and category effects in donation-based crowdfunding

Project descriptions in donation-based crowdfunding are supposed to give a full account of the incidents and help compensate for the lack of social cues, on which donors rely to judge if donations are worthwhile. The study examines three common communication modalities in project descriptions, including video, picture, and text, in terms of their effects on crowdfunding outcomes. Using webpages of a major crowdfunding platform (N = 4123), the author found that only a limited number of projects leveraged the benefits of embedding videos and pictures. Although having more videos and pictures generally predicted an increase in donation, the increase was unevenly distributed across different categories of projects. Meanwhile, topic modeling distinguished word clusters from description texts. While a variety of topic words relating to factual details positively predicted the fundraising outcomes, clusters featuring the overuse of requesting words such as “help”, “money”, and “thank” seemed to backfire. The findings shed light on the complex contingencies of communication modality effects across different types of projects and provide guidelines for more effective message design in crowdfunding campaigns.