A descriptive data analysis using Microsoft Excel's advanced tools to uncover trends and patterns in crowdfunding campaigns based on goals and launch date.

An upcoming playwrite wants to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the play "FEVER" with a $10,000 budget and needs insight to plan the campaign and set it up for success. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform available to fund creative projects. For more information, visit https://www.kickstarter.com/about.

The purpose of this project is to determine if there are specific factors that make a crowdfunding campaign successful or not based on the goals and launch dates of the campaign. Analyzing an Excel dataset of over 4,000 crowdfunding campaigns and data can help a client gain a greater understanding of campaigns from start to finish and allow the client to set the campaign to mirror successful ones in the same category.

Using Excel; the data was organized, sorted and filtered specifically for “theater” categories and “play” subcategories. Color-coded conditional formatting was applied to the dataset to easily distinguish between four outcomes: Successful, Failed, Canceled, and Live. Goals and pledged columns were sorted to research projects with similar budgets. Data was filtered and pivot tables were generated to get a refined review of the data using line charts to represent trends as shown below.

The below line chart reveals trends of successful, failed and canceled outcomes based on launch date in months:

The below line chart reveals trends of successful, failed and canceled outcomes based on goals:

No challenges were encountered during the research. However, possible challenges or difficulties that could arise might include misrepresentation of the data with inaccurate filtering in categories and financial information.

• Based on Chart 1 above, the following two conclusions can be made:

1. A trend of "theater" parent category outcomes based on launch date in months revealing higher success rates than failed or cancelled campaigns with 61% successful, 36% failed and 3% canceled. Therefore, a client can expect a higher success rate of getting the campaign funded.
2. A greater success rate of campaigns were held during the months of May and June with May being the highest. However; you will also notice December had roughly the same number of failed campaigns (50% successful versus 46% failed) launched with only a 4% difference. The month of October came in second place with 57% successful versus 43% failed. Therefore, a client should launch a "theater" campaign during the months of May or June.

• Based on Chart 2 above, the following conclusion can be made:

1. A greater success rate for campaign goals between $1-$15,000 and $35,000 - $45,000 and a higher failure rate for campaign goals between $20,000 - $35,000 and any goal over $45,000. Therefore, a client seeking $10,000 to fund a play has a higher success rate versus failure rate. However, the success rate is only 10% higher than the failure rate. A goal of $5,000 has a much higher success rate of 73% versus 27% failure rate

• The dataset was limited to one level of subcategories under theater.

• Other tables or graphs that could be generated: Bar charts and line charts to compare the number of "backers" in successful and failed compaigns.