How to Be Good with (Crowd)words: The influence of entrepreneurs’ narratives on crowdfunders’ intentions to support projects

Abstract

Despite the increasing popularity of crowdfunding, we still need to better understand the effect of entrepreneurs’ narratives on their campaign’s success. Drawing on “emotions as social information” theory, this paper explores the effect of emotions expressed via narratives on funders’ intentions to support a crowdfunding project. We conducted an experiment with 251 participants who had to assess their intention to support a project presented to them. The results show that emotions expressed via narratives are positively related with the emotional reaction of crowdfunders which in turn affects their intention to support a project. The results further show that the main processing style of crowdfunders (emotional versus cognitive) also has an impact on their emotional reaction, which is reinforced by the expression of emotions in the narratives.