With a little help from my friends: The role of online creator-fan communication channels in the success of creative crowdfunding campaigns

Abstract

Over the past decade, the creative and cultural industries (CCI) have embraced Direct-to-Fan (D2F) crowdfunding as a new and innovative mechanism to finance their independent creative endeavours. We analyse a private dataset of crowdfunding campaigns, comprising ex-ante community metrics and rich qualitative measures to determine how the social ties embedded within multiple coexisting online creator-fan communication channels impact the conversion of fans into campaign funders. Using a combination of negative binomial and logistic regressions, we find evidence of a clear hierarchy of importance of online communication channels, with email representing the most effective medium, followed by Facebook, and Twitter is the least important. This finding both supports the contention that stronger social ties are better relied upon for financial support, and shines a light on the importance of email, an otherwise under-considered factor in crowdfunding performance. A quantile regression analysis further demonstrates that the importance of social ties maintained through email tends to be relatively greater among better-performing campaigns, while for poorly performing campaigns the importance of the length of the written campaign description is greater. We conclude by offering several thoughts on how CCI creators can manage their online fan networks to develop stronger social ties and thus maximise the results of future D2F activities.