Personality Matters: How Signaling Personality Traits can Influence the Adoption and Diffusion of Crowdfunding Campaigns

The rapidly growing crowdfunding market allows individuals and organizations to raise funds for a diversity of projects. Potential investors, however, face uncertainties about the quality of the projects as well as the characteristics and behavioral intentions of the project creators due to a lack of publicly available and unbiased information. By analyzing 33,420 crowdfunding campaigns running on Kick-starter from January to August in 2015, we find that campaigns of project creators who are able to signal certain personality traits through their project description and video are more likely to succeed and to be shared via social media. More specifically, project creators who are able to convey open-ness and agreeableness are more likely to succeed with the adoption and diffusion of their campaigns compared to those signaling neuroticism. Our findings demonstrate that potential investors pay close attention to the way project creators present themselves and their projects on crowdfunding platforms. Project creators should therefore evaluate how to best communicate the favorable aspects of their project through their project description and video. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.