The impact of sustainable development goals on the success of online crowdfunding campaigns: An analysis through natural language processing techniques

Online crowdfunding platforms are emerging as a significant alternative potential finance method, which are playing a critical role in mobilizing resources to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This Study investigates the impact of SDG alignment on campaign success and, in addition, tries to find which individual sustainable development goals are more successful on a reward-based crowdfunding platform. By utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models on Kickstarter platform dataset of 138393 campaign launch between 2020 to 20204 to assess the relationship SDG alignment and campaign success, measured by the natural logarithms of the total pledged amount and the number of backers, while controlling for campaign duration, sentiment, project category, and geographical region. The findings show that SDG alignment has a statistically significant positive relationship with campaign success. Specifically, SDGs related to environmental such as SDG6 (Clean Water), SDG13 (Climate Action), and SDG14 (Life Below Water) significantly increase funding success. Conversely, campaigns focusing on basic needs such as SDG1 (No Poverty), SDG2 (Zero Hunger), SDG3 (Good Health), and SDG4 vi (Quality Education) tended to attract less funding and fewer backers on the Kickstarter platform. Sentiment in descriptions also contributes positively to the campaign's success, and campaign durations have a negative impact. Additionally, there are significant regional and category differences, with campaigns in the Asia-Pacific area and categories like Comics, Design, and Games performing better than those in North America and the Art category. These results offer practical implications for campaign creators, highlighting the strategic benefit of incorporating specific SDG themes, particularly environmental and justice-oriented ones, coupled with positive messaging and concise campaign timelines, while tailoring approaches to regional and categorical contexts to maximize crowdfunding success on reward-based platforms.