Financial Analytics of Crowdfunding Campaigns: Data Visualization and Implications in the Middle East

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the power of social capital (SC) i.e. structural demission (DS), relational demission (DR) and cognitive demission (DC) on the dynamic of CF campaigns in the Middle East using Zoomaal.com as a case study for 2019 and 2020. We collect the required data straightforwardly from Zoomaal.com and conducted online semi-structured interviews with key people in control to explore further crowdfunding practices in the selected Middle Eastern countries (i.e., Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and UAE). Both OLS robust standard error regression and logistic regression techniques were utilized to test the study model. The findings reveal that social capital in the Middle East countries is very coherent and both structural dimension (DS) as measured by entrepreneurs’ interaction with the social media (such as Facebook and Instagram) and cognitive dimension (DC) as measured by the number of words that are composed by entrepreneurs in the Zoomaal.com platform has significant positive impacts on the crowdfunding campaign success. Moreover, we confirm our results to Zoomaal.com and conclude three main factors that influence the success or failure of a crowdfunding campaign in the Middle East namely: the network impact, the story impact and the campaign itself. Finally, the study concludes that the more friends on Facebook (or followers on Instagram) that an entrepreneur has, and the more words entrepreneurs write in the platform to explain the project, the highly likely the crowdfunding campaign will be successful and vice versa.