The effects of money saliency and sustainability orientation on reward based crowdfunding success

Communication is a key determining factor of success in crowdfunding environments. In this paper, we examine the link between language used by founders and the contribution behavior of funders. Particularly, we investigate how verbal cues – money saliency and sustainability intention – in the communication text can affect the size of the contributing crowd and amount raised in the context of Kickstarter. Given the nature of crowdfunding environments (intrinsically motivated stakeholders) and Kickstarter's rewards-based structure, we hypothesize that there is a potential crowding-out effect in which an increased level of money saliency leads to decreased funding contributions and engagement. However, this effect should be weaker among projects that have non-selfish aims or intentions. Our analysis on close to 80,000 Kickstarter campaigns confirms that there is indeed a price to pay for using monetary-related terms in project descriptions but not among projects identified as sustainability oriented.