St. James Ballroom
Modeling the Success of Kickstarter Projects (303823)
*George Agyeah, Western Illinois University
Keywords: Success Modeling, Logistic regression, Fundraising, Kickstarter, R, SAS, Tableau
The goal of Kickstarter is to help bring creative projects to life. Kickstarter does this by modernizing a decades old way of fund raising. The business idea can be best likened to the traditional fundraiser model utilized by the Girl Scouts for decades. Just like the Girls Scouts cookie selling idea, Kickstarter provides an environment where entrepreneurs, social campaigners and activists can raise funds from the public by offering them tangible goods in return.
This report highlights the important segments of fundraising on Kickstarter. It seeks to derive a model that will help decision makers, new entrepreneurs and activists understand how to better manage their fundraisers to ensure success. According to the model the strongest predictors of success are goal, levels of donations available and category of product. The model shows that projects within certain categories have better success rates than other projects. Additionally, the project manager will be content in establishing a campaign goal wisely as well as providing enough options for backers to contribute. On the other hand, unrealistic funding goals and few options to contribute do not favor success.