Asking is Hard: Appeals Language in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication Jul 2025

Asking is Hard: Appeals Language in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns

Stephen Carradini ; Eric C. Nystrom University of Nevada, Reno

Abstract

Asking for money is one of the core communicative functions of a crowdfunding campaign. This article uses a novel corpus analysis scoring technique to investigate appeals language in a corpus of 312,529 Kickstarter campaigns. Our results show distinctive use patterns involving the verbs need , raise , please , make , and hope . Conceptual patterns, such as inviting the reader to participate in the creation of a product, underlie specific formulations of successful and unsuccessful word patterns and sentences. We conclude with theoretical and practical outcomes to aid technical communicators in more effectively writing crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter.

Journal: Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Published: 2025-07-01
DOI: 10.1177/00472816241262245
Open Access: Closed
Topics: quantitative research

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Cites in this index (2)

Carradini et al. (2023)

The Effects of Multimodal Elements on Success in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns

Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Gallagher et al. (2022)

Project-Oriented Web Scraping in Technical Communication Research

Journal of Business and Technical Communication

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