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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Perceptions of Crowdfunding Campaigns and Performance : An Empirical Analysis

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Master's thesis Business Administration BE501 - University of Agder 2017 Crowdfunding gives entrepreneurs and others, opportunities to get financial contributions to their projects as well as acknowledgements and insight to consumers’ preferences. This thesis focuses on reward-based crowdfunding and aims to explain why some campaigns perform better than others. The data set only includes campaigns with less than 50% of funding received and relatively small funds raised. By only analyzing campaigns with low performance, this study can be helpful for campaigners that opt for a “keep what you raise” campaign strategy, compared to “all-or-nothing” campaigns that have been studied thus far. Logistic regression is used to find the relationship between seven independent variables and performance of campaigns - both on the performance rate and the sum raised. Reward quality and environmental orientation were partly found to have a significantly influence on the performance of campaigns. Nevertheless, the most important finding might be that few factors had significant impact on predicting differences in performance between the crowdfunding campaigns studied. Hence, the complexity of making a campaign that performs better than others is emphasized. In contrast to previous studies, which mostly have used official data from crowdfunding platforms, I have collected people’s perceptions of crowdfunding campaigns as the basis for analysis. Moreover, this thesis introduces the concepts of logos and pathos in relation to crowdfunding. Further studies may confirm whether these concepts influence the performance of crowdfunding campaigns. Generally, this study highlights the effort required by people that want to initiate a crowdfunding campaign. Entrepreneurs and others must be aware that crowdfunding is a complex activity that requires extensive work beyond making a sufficient campaign page on a crowdfunding platform.