How emotional cues affect the financing performance in rewarded crowdfunding? - an insight into multimodal data analysis

An increasing number of rewarded crowdfunding platforms recommend that fundraisers post multimodal data to improve data diversity and attract investors’ attention. Fundraisers’ speech contains both textual modality (text) and acoustic modality (voice) data. This study aims to explore how linguistic style of the speech text and acoustic features of the speech voice influence the crowdfunding campaign performance from the perspective of emotional contagion. An econometric model to investigate the effects of emotional cues from fundraisers’ speech on rewarded crowdfunding performance is constructed, and an empirical analysis with 21,996 projects data in Kickstarter is conducted. The findings demonstrate that both acoustic emotional cues (voice pitch, intensity and speech rate) and textual emotional cues (intimate and perceptual language) have significant effect on the financing performance. Among them, voice pitch, speech rate, intimate language and perceptual language have significant positive effect on the financing performance, while voice intensity is negatively related to financing performance. The number of comments positively moderates the relationship between emotional cues in speech and project financing performance. Research also finds that the acoustic and textual emotional features in speech have different effects on the success rate of project financing under different types of projects. This investigation provides both theoretical implications for the literature of crowdfunding and practical implications for fundraisers.