As the marketplace for crowdfunding grows to an estimated $5 billion dollars in
2013, academic research exploring the second largest platform Indiegogo has been
largely overlooked. This research identifies causal characteristics that differentiate
content and social spread strategies across ten technology campaigns on Indiegogo,
covering a wide pledge fundraising range from $13,417 to $1,960,503. The researcher’s
central hypothesis that better content and spread strategy executions would generate more
campaign activity and higher pledges was proven to be generally true, but also an
oversimplification of complex variables. Successful campaigns can be defined by both
the pledge amount raised and the percent of goal reached, whereas all campaigns
surveyed reached over 100% of their set goal. All campaigns selected met three key
criteria in that they: launched by April 1st, 2013 and ended before October 15th, 2013,
lasted between 31 and 51 days and used a Vimeo video player with open statistics. A five
tier framework was designed to classify Blockbuster, Intermediate and Base level
performance. Close watch was given to mainly the campaign pitch video followed by page content and social media channels. The pitch video content analysis examines
narrative content tactics, technical triggers and pledge participation prompts and found
that higher performing campaigns generally aligned with the optimized content analysis
units, with some exceptions. There was a strong connection between more video views,
especially at the frontend of the campaign, raising greater pledge amounts. Campaigns
with more page content comments leveraged higher audience participation and pledges.
Social media activity mainly through Facebook Likes had the most impact on pledge
participation across campaigns. Video source traffic arrived mostly to the Indiegogo page
from social media, email marketing and to a lesser extent from referral blogs and website
links. In summary, the characteristics that defined better content and spread strategy
executions were certainly related to increased campaign activity and higher pledges, but
exhibited complex behaviors requiring more data to comprehensively understand the
direct impact on a campaign’s performance. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/23492 |
| Date | 11 March 2014 |
| Creators | Stern, Joseph S., active 2013 |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds