Capitalizing on the Moment: The Strategic Role of Information Disclosure in Online Crowdfunding

Abstract

Online crowdfunding platforms have created new avenues for investors to finance existing businesses or new business ventures of project creators. Project creators who launch crowdfunding campaigns can provide progress updates to potential investors throughout the fundraising process, helping to alleviate potential investors’ uncertainty about the project’s success. However, limited attention has been given to the strategic decisions of project creators on when to provide campaign updates. In this study, we focus on the timing strategy of information disclosure and investigate the effectiveness of campaign updates at different timing and performance level. Using a dataset from a leading online crowdfunding platform, we find that updates are more effective at the earlier stage of a crowdfunding campaign in attracting investors, and they play a different role depending on the project’s fundraising performance. For underperforming campaigns, the effectiveness of updates is more salient at the early stage of the campaign, whereas we find no differential impact at the later stage. By employing text analyses on the project descriptions and updates, we also derive insights about how the content of updates impacts their effectiveness at different stages of the campaign. Finally, our results also show that the timing of updates is more important for less experienced project creators, whereas the content of updates is more important for experienced project creators. These results provide important insights for project creators to strategically manage their campaigns in online crowdfunding platforms.