Campaign design features and funding success: an analysis of reward-based crowdfunding in social media platform ecosystems

Abstract

While financial return motivations often play a role in equity crowdfunding, backers are also influenced by social, emotional, and community-based factors, particularly in campaigns with strong narratives or social media engagement (Johnson and Jansson, 2021; Block et al., 2018). In contrast, reward-based crowdfunding must contend with a broader spectrum of crowd behaviour, shaped by diverse non-financial incentives and social signalling mechanisms. In this paper, we provide an assessment of the role of social media platforms in influencing reward-based crowdfunding campaigns achieving their funding goals. We examine social media use in campaign design and whether the attractiveness of a project influences funding success. Understanding the various attributes of a social media platform ecosystem is important because funders in reward-based crowdfunding projects generally have limited expertise to fully appreciate their investment opportunities. We collated six months of data within the Film and Video category on the Kickstarter's crowdfunding platform to address our research questions. We show that, to build rapport with funders, creators can adopt several social media strategies. These strategies mitigate information asymmetries by providing more information and support to crowdfunding campaigns and projects. Our findings shed light on the interdependency between social media and crowdfunding platforms. This study offers a novel integrated perspective by jointly modelling campaign design features and social media dynamics as mechanisms that reduce information asymmetry in reward-based crowdfunding. Unlike prior work that examines these factors in isolation, we demonstrate how their interaction shapes both funding success and backer participation in cultural crowdfunding contexts.