Assistant Professor in English Publishes Book on Sustainable Crowdfunding

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Cover of assistant professor Adam R. Pope's "Sustainable Crowdfunding."

Adam R. Pope, assistant professor in the Department of English, has published a book this summer on building and sustaining crowdfunding campaigns as a durable means of organizational funding. Pope's book covers campaigns on GoFundMe, Kickstarter and Patreon while also surveying the broader crowdfunding landscape and the platform affordances available to creators and organizations seeking funding. 

Published as part of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing's book series, Sustainable Crowdfunding surveys the history and platform structure of crowdfunding through the lens of experience architecture and user experience design. Using a series of case studies and a combination of quantiatitve text processing tools and qualitative analysis, Pope identifies the ways that the creators of crowdfunding campaigns that went on to be the first of a chain of serial successes managed to build communitty and connect with community ideas and ideals via their project pitch and update strategy, with a special focus on the long haul of updates between funding being met and the project being delivered. 

"I became interested in crowdfunding," explains Pope, "when there was a string of successful and high-profile revivals of classic computer game franchises on Kickstarter, beginning with Double Fine Adventure. The creators of genres that hadn't really been touched on in the wider video game community were being revived by their original creators via massive amounts of funding from fandoms. As a technical writer, the function of the genre to capture and leverage a community's excitement and energy was intriguing." 

"The book project," continues Pope, "became focused early in the process on the ways that crowdfunding could be used for durable funding means. Many of the creators I saw on these platforms were able to come back to the platforms a second time and get projects backed almost immediately. One of the early studios that caught my eye, Larian Studios, built on that success for two award-winning games followed by this year's blockbuster CRPG success Baldur's Gate 3. There was something happenign in these campaigns as they went from funding to delivery that gave these creators the ability to turn around and get funding a second time, and that became the focus of my text." 

Having finished the project, Pope hopes to continue his work on crowdfunding and community, with his next project looking specifically at subscription-based crowdfunding via Patreon and other similar platforms.