Crowdfunding Success Factors: The Characteristics of Successfully Funded Projects on Crowdfunding Platforms

Crowdfunding platforms offer promising opportunities for project founders to publish their project ideas and to collect money in order to be able to realize them. Consequently, the question of what influences the successful funding of projects, i.e., reaching the target amount of money, is very important. Building upon media richness theory and the concept of reciprocity, we extend previous research in the field of crowdfunding success factors. We provide a comprehensive view on factors influencing crowdfunding success by both focusing on project-specific as well as founder-specific aspects. Analyzing a sample of projects of the crowdfunding platform kickstarter.com, we find that the project description, related images and videos as well as the question of whether the founder has previously backed other projects influence funding success. Interestingly, the question of whether the founder has previously created other projects has no significant influence. Our results are of high interest for the stakeholders on crowdfunding platforms.