Convincing Crowdvoting Campaigns - The Persuasive Characteristics of New Venture Crowdvoting Campaigns

Sammanfattning: Today, many entrepreneurs turn to online crowdsourcing platforms to acquire resources and support for their ventures. While the pursuit of financial capital through crowdfunding platforms has received much attention from researchers, the pursuit of non-financial support has grown significantly in importance among new ventures. In this context, entrepreneurs construct venture campaigns with the hopes of persuading supporters to endorse their ventures, with significant implications for future resource acquisition and venture growth. While the study of crowdfunding success has received much attention from researchers, how entrepreneurs go about persuading non-financial supporters to endorse their ventures in this newer context has largely been overlooked. In this study, we utilize the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and previous findings from crowdfunding to understand how entrepreneurs successfully persuade supporters on these crowdvoting platforms to endorse their ventures. By analyzing a sample of over 30,000 campaigns from the crowdvoting platform Product Hunt, we find that narrative length, source credibility, and visual cues of campaigns are all positively related to supporter endorsement. With this study, we take the first step in understanding the dynamics of this novel method of resource acquisition for new ventures and provide practical insights for entrepreneurs to consider when constructing their campaigns in these crowdvoting contexts.