I am absolutely thrilled to report that “The Effects of Multimodal Elements on Success in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns” is live now at the Journal of Business and Technical Communication! This is my first JBTC article, and I’m very excited to publish there.
I’m also very excited because this is the first article produced from a C. R. Anderson grant that the Association for Business Communication gave me. It is an honor to have received the grant and a joy to have finally produced a finished article from this complicated, multi-year project. (Shoutout to Jacob Rawlins for being the world’s most patient grant administrator.)
Thank you to Carolin Fleischmann for being a fantastic co-author on this piece: jumping on this project at a point of great difficulty made this publication possible.
Enormous thanks to Barbara Carradini, who helped scrape the data for this project.
The abstract is here:
This article investigates multimodal elements—images, links, gifs, videos, and galleries—of crowdfunding campaigns on the platform Kickstarter to develop an understanding of characteristics of successful campaigns. The authors scraped 327,586 campaign pages, analyzing the multimodal elements of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. They found that successful campaigns featured more images, links, and gifs and more frequently included a project video than did unsuccessful campaigns. Images, links, and the presence of a project video had a positive impact on success while gifs and project galleries did not. These findings give business communicators practical guidance, develop theoretical aspects of Kickstarter research, and validate previous findings with a larger data set.
There will be more publications from this dataset! I look forward to sharing them all as soon as I can.