When Emotions Matter: Emotional-Mission Congruence in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

When are emotional appeals effective for entrepreneurial ventures seeking funding? Questioning the assumption that all positive emotions are equally effective, we propose and empirically validate the idea that only emotions well-aligned with an organization’s purpose retain their signaling value. We use EmoBERTa, a transformer-based emotion detector, to analyze 275,197 Kickstarter campaigns (2009–2020) and find that emotional expression generally reduces campaign success, indicating increased professionalism in the crowdfunding marketplace. However, campaigns with an explicit prosocial mission are more successful when they express caring emotions compared to other positive emotions (admiration, desire, excitement, joy, love, and optimism). We also found that this effect is more pronounced when campaigns receive no institutional endorsement, such as Kickstarter staff picks. Together, this suggests that emotional appeals matched to an organization’s mission are most effective, especially when the projects are not institutionally recognized. Together, this study enhances our understanding of when and why certain positive emotions are more persuasive than others, challenging conventional wisdom that all positive emotions are equally effective.