Mobilizing backers? Sustainability framing and success in crowdfunding

We analyze the impact of sustainability framing on entrepreneurial legitimacy seeking efforts in the context of crowdfunding campaigns. Crowdfunding is a new form of capital acquisition that allows people to solicit investments directly from a large audience. Drawing on research on frames rooted in social movement and managerial cognition, we argue that sustainability has become an important and ubiquitous value frame, and hypothesize that a sustainability frame will enable aspiring entrepreneurs to legitimate their business idea and attract financial resources from the crowd. By analyzing 164,056 projects published on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter between 2009 and 2015 using customized software and specifically developed algorithms, we find that sustainability framing plays a key role in predicting crowdfunding success. Our results demonstrate the power of communicative tools, and have important implications for the literatures on entrepreneurial legitimacy and framing, sustainability, as well as crowdfunding.