What influences crowdfunding campaign success.

Abstract

Crowdfunding is a recently emerged market for entrepreneurs; it represents a new and growing source of potential capital. The potential crowdfunding is starting to reach it potential, and has beginning to go mainstream. There is a gap in the research on crowdfunding and within the field of what separates a successful campaign from a failed one. To explore the variables influencing crowdfunding campaign this paper looks into academic articles, the crowdfunding platforms, general media, journalist, newspapers, webpages and bloggers by doing an exploratory content analysis to find what these sources suggest as the most important drivers, leading up to the research question: what influences crowdfunding campaign? This study contributes to the emerging field of crowdfunding and specifically to the success drivers within campaigns. The findings are separated into four overarching categories of variables influencing campaign success; variables in the preparation phase leading up to a campaign launch, variables tied to actions taken within the campaign, variables linked to the content of the campaign and variables describing which places the campaign should be present outside a crowdfunding platform. The findings indicate that all four categories are important and that there are a large set of variables and proposed research questions to examine in future research on crowdfunding success. Key Word: Influencing variables on crowdfunding; crowdfunding success; crowdfunding campaign variables