Purpose

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Design/methodology/approach

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Findings

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

Research limitations/implications

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

Practical implications

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

Social implications

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

Originality/value

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.

中文翻译：

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众筹项目融资意向中的语言风格和性别匹配

目的

该研究旨在探索语言风格和性别匹配作为潜在捐助者之间初始信任的关键部分，以及这如何基于相似性吸引和同质理论导致资金成功。对 160 名受访者的实证分析表明，相比“谁写的”（性别），人们更关心“它是如何写的”（语言风格）。

设计/方法/方法

众筹 (CF) 是项目创始人采用的一种基于互联网的融资方式，允许个人从人群中筹集资金来支持他们的项目。项目创始人吸引大众的兴趣很重要，因为潜在的资助者通常对项目的信息有限。在 CF 项目中可以被人群接受的项目的早期线索之一是提案的文本描述。这段文字描述对于让大众了解项目、促进大众对创始人的信任、鼓励他们为 CF 项目提供资金至关重要。基于相似吸引和同质理论，本研究着手探索语言风格和性别匹配是潜在捐助者之间初始信任的关键要素，以及它们如何导致资金成功。本研究采用 2 × 2 析因实验设计（例如受试者、男性和女性、×男性语言风格和女性语言风格）。为了确定实验的样本量，本研究应用功效和样本量估计来衡量实验需要多少受访者。根据效应大小的功效表，128 名受访者被认为足以进行该实验，以确保 0.8 的足够统计功效和 0.05 的显着性水平。本研究通过招募 160 名受访者满足要求，基于 2 × 2 因子设计（受访者的性别，男性和女性，文本语言风格，男性和女性）对应于每组 40 名受试者。

发现

本文有助于项目创始人对语言风格重要性的理解和认识，这可以决定 CF 项目的成功。这项研究的一个重要结果是，人群可以根据他们的写作风格来识别作者的性别。通过应用因子分析（2×2）的实验发现，人们更关心“它是如何写的”（语言风格）而不是“它是由谁写的”（性别）。这意味着项目创始人，如果他们知道他们的受众是谁，就应该知道如何编写项目提案，使其符合受众的喜好。更具体地说，可以通过在CF平台上的项目推广中整合合适的词维度来提高CF项目的成功率。所以，可以说，语言风格是与目标受众建立联系的强大媒介。本研究的结果可以作为理论指导，最终可以进一步探索资助意向的潜在前因。

研究限制/影响

这项研究受到几个限制。结果仅限于基于捐赠的 CF。由于本研究侧重于项目创始人在描述其 CF 项目时的语言风格，因此基于捐赠的 CF 是本研究最合适的平台。在基于捐赠的 CF 中，与其他 CF 平台相比，风格词更基于情感。然而，该实验也可以复制到其他 CF 类型，例如基于奖励的 CF。CF 项目的一个重要部分是说服人群为他们提供资金。值得一提的是，基于奖励的 CF 涉及个人向企业承诺以换取奖励。然而，即使基于奖励的 CF 提供奖励，它通常被认为是基于捐赠的 CF 的一个子集，因为支持者没有经济回报。所以，建议未来的研究还应考虑基于奖励的 CF 中的案例研究。其次，从说服的角度来看，本研究仅关注叙事语言风格，因为它有助于大众对 CF 项目的理解。未来的研究可以进一步关注项目提案中的其他信息内容，例如视频。先前的研究发现，在 CF 项目中提供视频会增加人群对资金的信心（Mitra，2012）。该研究还得到了先前研究的支持，这些研究表明在项目提案中制作更高质量的视频与 CF 项目的成功呈正相关（Mollick (2014)）。未来的研究可以进一步关注项目提案中的其他信息内容，例如视频。先前的研究发现，在 CF 项目中提供视频会增加人群对资金的信心（Mitra，2012）。该研究还得到了先前研究的支持，这些研究表明在项目提案中制作更高质量的视频与 CF 项目的成功呈正相关（Mollick (2014)）。未来的研究可以进一步关注项目提案中的其他信息内容，例如视频。先前的研究发现，在 CF 项目中提供视频会增加人群对资金的信心（Mitra，2012）。该研究还得到了先前研究的支持，这些研究表明在项目提案中制作更高质量的视频与 CF 项目的成功呈正相关（Mollick (2014)）。

实际影响

本研究的结果实证证实了人群对项目提案的资助意愿和信任度取决于项目提案的文本描述。项目创始人需要知道如何描述项目的内容，以表明项目的质量，尤其是在早期启动阶段。换句话说，通过 CF 平台创建和发布项目的方式将向潜在捐助者发送有关该项目的宝贵信号，他们要么接受，要么拒绝。如果项目似乎缺乏潜在捐助者的需求，项目创始人更容易快速确定项目将失败，而无需投入额外资金。

社会影响

这项研究的结果具有重要的社会意义，为项目创始人制定策略以帮助大众了解他们的项目提供指导。同时，调查结果可以帮助群众做出资助决定。首先，项目创始人在 CF 项目中使用的文本语言在展示活动方面起着重要作用，所有想法都需要以清晰的方式呈现，以便人群了解项目。在 CF 项目中，音调就是一切（Varsamis，2018）。推介是指项目创始人提供的文字或视频，用于向人群展示他们的项目提案。相较于传统的融资渠道（如风险投资，即银行），CF更方便的筹集资金。这是因为项目创始人需要在网上以创造性的方式向人群展示他们的想法，而不是准备复杂的计划并绞尽脑汁想如何说服投资者参与（Wang and Yang (2019)）。本研究旨在帮助项目创始人了解如何通过改进其 CF 项目中使用的文本语言来影响人群。

原创性/价值

本文满足了研究项目创始人的语言风格如何导致众筹项目成功率的确定需求。