Immediacy Communication and Success in Crowdfunding Campaigns: A Multimodal Communication Approach

Crowdfunding (CF) is an increasingly popular form of Internet-based fundraising that attracts considerable research interest; however, investigations on the relationship between success in CF campaigns and the multimodal communication approach are absent in the literature. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of reward-based CF video campaigns and identified various measures of success for financing and for backer involvement. Our findings highlight the predictive power of a wide range of verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors. This study contributes a multimodal communication approach for explaining success in CF campaigns and expands immediacy communication theory by developing a novel combination of verbal and nonverbal immediacy and nonimmediacy communication behaviors. We also reveal the effect of verbal and nonverbal interrelations on the success of CF campaigns. Finally, we extend the reliance theory of verbal versus nonverbal primacy for success in CF campaigns.