Apple Crunch: Proposal

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Proposal

Problem and Motivation

Problem: For many, acquiring enough finances to turn their idea into a business is a big issue so some would go for crowdfunding platforms as a means to obtain the required amount to start their business. Kickstarter is one of the more popular crowdfunding platform, but they have an "all or nothing" rule where the campaign cannot get the donated amount if it does not reach the goal set by the business. As of October 5th 2018, only about one in every three campaigns reach their funding goal, which means that most do not get the funding they need from Kickstarter.

Motivation: There is a need to understand what makes a successful campaign. Are there any attributes that sets apart projects that are successful? The team would like to create several visualizations on kickstarter campaign data to analyze trends and determine if certain attributes of a campaign such as "amount of funding set" affects its chances of succeeding. In the end, the team hopes that others can use the visualizations created in order to have a better understanding of how they should create their campaign to have a higher chance of success.

Data

The group will only use one csv file as the source of data.

Dataset
ks-projects-201801.csv from https://www.kaggle.com/kemical/kickstarter-projects#ks-projects-201801.csv

Details of Dataset

Column	Description
ID	ID of the campaign / project
name	Name(Title) of the campaign / project
category	Sub-category of the campaign
main_category	Main category of the campaign
currency	Currency used for funds of the campaign
deadline	Until when the campaign will run
goal	Goal amount to reach of the campaign in their currency
launched	When this campaign started
pledged	Amount pledged by donors in the currency of the campaign
state	Status of the campaign (successful? failed?)
backers	How many donors
country	Which country is the campaigned launched
usd pledged	Pledged amount converted to USD by KS conversion
usd_pledged_real	Pledged amount converted to USD by fixer.io
usd_goal_real	Goal amount converted to USD

Survey of Related Work

Related Work	Points to Consider
https://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/	The inforgraphic has presented various ideas to explore in terms of what kinds of visualizations to create. The inforgraphic mostly presented numbers and not an in depth visualization. The things to consider by looking at this work would be the following: By how much do projects/campaigns succeed or fail? What are the success rates per category? Which features of a campaign are related with its success?
https://www.displayr.com/how-to-guarantee-your-kickstarter-will-succeed/	This chart shows another point to consider which is how the number of backers affect the success rate of a project. The use of pie chart however, may not be what the group will use.
Example	Example

Technical Challenges

Technical Challenge	Solution
Group is not that experienced and familiar with visualization softwares	Watch Videos Online Learn as a group and help each other
Crawling Certain information such as the city or state of the campaign and the description of the campaign have to be obtained by crawling	Learn how to crawl online Set aside time every day to work together
No experience with javascript and D3	Watch videos and read about javascript and D3 Work and ask one another