Go Fund Yourself

1. DEFINITIONS OF SUCCESS 1.1. Definition of success of Crowdfunding Campaign - Ziele im Zeitraum während der Kampagne, direkt Verbunden mit der Kampagne - Definiertes Ziels: Sammeln von Ressourcen - Verschiedene Möglichkeiten Erfolg zu erzielen, Branchenabhängig? z.B.: Kommunikation durch Netzwerke, Präsents in den Medien, Werbung, Grafische Darstellungen (Optik), .. usw. - Klarer Erfolg: durch Erfolg von genug Ansammlung von Ressourcen oder nicht 1.2. Definition of success of Crowdfunding Project - Ziel kann nach der Kampagne entstehen/geschehen, nicht direkt Verbunden mit der Kampagne - Durch Kampagne nicht immer ersichtliches Ziel, z.B.: Werbung, Aufmerksamkeit/Nachdenklichkeit wecken, schockieren, Investoren begeistern usw. - Erfolg ist nicht so sehr gebunden an Kampagne Eine Kampagne kann Erfolgreich sein, dieser Erfolg muss jedoch nicht mit dem Erfolg des Projekts an sich zusammenhängen. Interessant wird die Analyse in den Beispielen, in welchen der Erfolg der Crowd Founding Kampagne nicht gleich auch den Erfolg des Projekts bedeutet und umgekehrt.

2. STATISTICS PER CATEGORY

A variety of factors influence the end result of a Crowd funding campaign, such as: the platform being used, seriousness in approach to the project, proper social networking, use of media in explanation of the project, realistic projection of funding goals, research of the best suitable rewards, and so on . However, success of the project can also have something to do with the category it belongs to. Some categories are more interesting for potential donors and more popular than others. 'Market' saturation is another element that influences potential success in a way that the large number of project in a category will result in a lower success rate. That is why it is important to analyze and compare categories based on the current number of projects and success rates, and to see if the link between success of the campaign and the category it belongs to can be made. The overall success rate for projects hosted on the biggest and most successful platform -('Kickstarter') is approximately 44% (as of January 2014), which means that more than half of the crowdfunding campaigns do not reach their ultimate funding goals. Nevertheless, some categories have better rates than others do. While these statistics are based on Kickstarter projects, they can apply to all of the crowdfunding industry. Dance and Theatre with their 71% and 64% success rates are the most successful categories on this platform. The most unsuccessful categories are Publishing and Fashion with 32% and 30% success rates. Astonishingly, Games and Technology are one of the categories with the lowest rates of success (both have only 35%), being that games and technology projects were responsible for the blooming of the crowdfunding platforms. With its 40% and 48% rates, Film and Art stand in the middle of the Success Rate Graph. Another important parameter in analyzing statistical data is the number of the projects, where it can be seen that the most popular categories are Film and Video (with a total number of 29624 projects) and Music (with a total number of 24707 projects). Games has 6841, Technology 2887, Art 10374, whilst Dance has only 1517 projects. The statistics also show that when it comes to average funding per Campaign, category Games is on the second place with 36,162.84 $. Technology, which is one of most unsuccessful categories, is on the first place with 40,095.29 $, while Dance has only 10,572.08$, whilst Art has only an average of a 4895,00 $ per campaign. Even though category Games is one of the least successful, it has also in total the highest gross of 160 Million Dollars. It is somewhat a paradox, and it has to do with the fact that a successful game a lot of times gets overfunded and exceeds its funding goal (Game Broken age had exceeded the $400,000 goal with more than $3.3 million from over 87,000 backers). What the data shows is that a link between the rate of success and the average funding per campaign can be found. Two of the most successful categories, Dance and Theater, have also one of the lowest funding goals. Furthermore, Games and Technology, one of the least successful categories have also the highest funding goals. A grate success of the Dance has probably a lot to do with the low funding goals and the fact that there are 1,3 % of the dance crowdfunding campaigns. Another aspect that should be analyzed is sociological, where the dance and art 'offline' society is a rather stronger connected, as appose to 'games' society. With a small funding goals and with the first ring of the donations that are based on the friends and family pledges, it is simpler for an artist or a dances to come to it's goal. However, majority of the campaigns don't even surpass the first step of the funding, and near 80% of them never raised more than 20 % of their goal.

File:I:\Grafici 3. PROJECTS´ ANALYSIS 4. ACHIEVING SUCCESS