Recently, I was asked some questions about Goals for #SciFund participants that I hadn’t investigated since round 1. Namely, what’s do people usually ask for? Which of course led me in a few directions.
First, what do folk ask for?
The mean ask is $3356.33 with the median at $2500 over all three rounds. Or, for a round-by-round breakdown
| Round | Mean.Goal | Median.Goal |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4584.28 | 3500.00 |
| 2 | 2175.90 | 2000.00 |
| 3 | 3308.50 | 2500.00 |
So, the goal has is kind of bouncing around a bit. To see that visually:
Of course, this got me thinking – has the relationship between goal and success (weak in R1) ever really meant anything? Is it changing? So, I ran a quickie analysis…In general, it appears that larger and larger projects are hitting their 100% goal over time.
The analysis agrees – looking at how the observed log(Goal) was predicted by whether or not a project was funded at 100% and what round it was in, there’s an interaction between funded status and round. Basically, the analysis says the same thing as the plot – as we’ve progressed, bigger and bigger projects are hitting 100%!
| Sum Sq | Df | F value | Pr(≤F) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fully.funded. | 5.98 | 1 | 13.56 | 0.0004 |
| Round | 5.39 | 2 | 6.11 | 0.0030 |
| Fully.funded.:Round | 3.52 | 2 | 3.99 | 0.0212 |
| Residuals | 48.93 | 111 |
| Estimate | Std. Error | t value | Pr(≤|t|) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Intercept) | 8.3438 | 0.1092 | 76.44 | 0.0000 |
| Fully.funded.Yes | -1.0335 | 0.2366 | -4.37 | 0.0000 |
| Round2 | -0.6946 | 0.1763 | -3.94 | 0.0001 |
| Round3 | -0.3856 | 0.2280 | -1.69 | 0.0937 |
| Fully.funded.Yes:Round2 | 0.7463 | 0.3046 | 2.45 | 0.0159 |
| Fully.funded.Yes:Round3 | 0.9003 | 0.3690 | 2.44 | 0.0163 |
Interesting, no?
Nice analysis, Jarrett!
I’m curious whether conversion rates have also crept upward as SciFund has progressed? Here I define conversion rate simply as donors / pageviews, and there are reasonable proxies for pageviews if Google Analytics data is missing.
At Microryza, the overall conversion rate across projects is fairly consistently in the 2-3% range, with temporary spikes (doubling even) in conversion rate precipitated by press/blogosphere/Twitter KOL mentions. Notwithstanding media coverage, conversion rates are higher at the beginning and end of campaigns. I would expect those features to be stable across rounds, but perhaps overall conversion rates are creeping up as accumulated knowledge of crowdfunding and best practices emerge.
Yep – 2.06% in R1, 3.51% in R2, and 3.11% in R3. Lots of spread in the numbers there, though. Intriguingly, no relationship with total amount raised (p>0.18). Might be neat to dig into further.