How to be good with (crowd)words: The influence of entrepreneurs' narratives on crowdfunders' intention to support a project

Despite the increasing popularity of crowdfunding, the way entrepreneurs can influence the success of their campaign remains relatively unknown. In this paper, we investigate how entrepreneurs’ narrative affects funders’ attitude and intention to fund a project on crowdfunding platforms. This study draws upon research on the social influence of emotions, on motivations and attitude mechanism, and on narratives in order to develop and test a set of hypotheses about crowdfunders’ emotional reactions to narratives and their subsequent intention to fund, according to their motivations. To confirm our intuition, we conducted an experimentation with 251 participants who had to assess a crowdfunding project. Results show how crowdfunders’ primary motivations affect their choice of crowdfunding platforms and the relationship between the content of narratives and their attitude and intention to fund. Our study is grounded in theories which try to recognize the role of emotions (along with cognitive processes) in the decision making of money providers (Jennings et al., 2015)