Achieving Reward-Based Crowdfunding Project Success: An Examination of Value Congruence

Authors

Bright Frimpong, Washington and Lee UniversityFollow
Emmanuel Ayaburi, Baylor UniversityFollow
Francis Kofi Andoh-Baidoo, University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Abstract

Crowdfunding founders increasingly rely on reward-based platforms to raise capital for their projects. However, the low success rate of reward-based project campaigns remains a concern for many founders and platform managers. Prior studies investigating participants’ motivations have focused on either the founder or backer perspective, with little research examining the joint effects of founder and backer motivations. Drawing on the theory of basic human values, we assert that founders and backers are strategic about their motivations for engaging in crowdfunding campaigns. We identify four basic human values—self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change, and conservation—that may reveal their intrinsic motivations and investigate how the degree of congruence between founders and backers on these values can influence campaign success. Using data from Kickstarter, we first extract evidence of these four values from the founder’s project description and backers’ comments for each project and empirically test a moderated model of reward-based crowdfunding success. The findings indicate that congruences in the openness to change, self-transcendence, and conservation values between founders and backers positively relate to project campaign success, but these relationships weaken when the congruence becomes excessive. However, self-enhancement value congruence between founders and backers can consistently maintain a stable positive influence on project campaign success. Furthermore, linguistic conformity is positively related to campaign success but reduces the distinctiveness of the congruence effects related to self-transcendence and openness to change. The study’s findings contribute to the value congruence literature and provide insights on how to improve the chances of project success in reward-based crowdfunding.

Recommended Citation

Frimpong, Bright; Ayaburi, Emmanuel; and Andoh-Baidoo, Francis Kofi (2025) "Achieving Reward-Based Crowdfunding Project Success: An Examination of Value Congruence," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 26(3), 879-908.
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00924
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol26/iss3/1

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00924