  While small businesses are increasingly turning to online crowdfunding
platforms for essential funding, over 40% of these campaigns may fail to raise
any money, especially those from low socio-economic areas. We utilize the
latest advancements in AI technology to identify crucial factors that influence
the success of crowdfunding campaigns and to improve their fundraising outcomes
by strategically optimizing these factors. Our best-performing machine learning
model accurately predicts the fundraising outcomes of 81.0% of campaigns,
primarily based on their textual descriptions. Interpreting the machine
learning model allows us to provide actionable suggestions on improving the
textual description before launching a campaign. We demonstrate that by
augmenting just three aspects of the narrative using a large language model, a
campaign becomes more preferable to 83% human evaluators, and its likelihood of
securing financial support increases by 11.9%. Our research uncovers the
effective strategies for crafting descriptions for small business fundraising
campaigns and opens up a new realm in integrating large language models into
crowdfunding methodologies.
