I Am What I Pledge: The Importance of Value Alignment for Mobilizing Backers in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has emerged as an important alternative financing tool for entrepreneurs. Extant research on the antecedents of crowdfunding success have produced divergent results. By applying the cross-disciplinary lens of strategic linguistic framing, that is, framing campaign messages in a way that is salient and that resonates with the values of the audience, we experimentally examine the role of value framing for a successful campaign outcome. Our results indicate that altruistically framed campaigns have a higher chance for funding compared to campaigns that emphasize egoistic or environmental motives, but even more importantly, that message framing needs to be aligned with the personal values of the backers. As such, our study highlights important similarities between resource mobilization in social movements and in crowdfunding.