Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Tourism Management Perspectives journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tmp What drives visitor economy crowdfunding? The effect of digital storytelling on unified theory of acceptance and use of technology Myung Ja Kim a, ⁎ , C. Michael Hall b,c,d a The College of Hotel & Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02447, Republic of Korea b Department of Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand c Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland d School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Digital storytelling Crowdfunding Visitor economy Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) Leisure and tourism-related fields South Korea ABSTRACT Digital storytelling is a key factor used by fundraisers to attract investors to crowdfunding projects. Despite the important role of digital storytelling in consumer persuasion, research on the effect of digital storytelling on consumer behavior is scarce in the visitor economy crowdfunding sector. The objective of this work is to create and verify a theoretically integrated research framework including three-dimensions of digital storytelling as a reflective second order factor (perceived esthetics, narrative structure, and self-reference) and concepts of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (performance expectancy, social influence, effort expectancy, facilitating condition, and intention). Results reveal that digital storytelling has highly significant effects on facilitating condition, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence in descending order. Investors' intention to crowdfund is also significantly affected by facilitating condition, performance expectancy, social influence, and effort expectancy in descending order, offering significant theoretical and managerial implications in leisure and tourism. 1. Introduction Internet-based fundraising provides a new way to invest via online platforms (e.g., Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Wadiz). A growing number of entrepreneurial and business initiatives are seeking to obtain capital via crowdfunding. Unlike, traditional business financing Internet-based crowdfunding draws relatively small contributions from individuals without standard financial intermediaries (Colombo, Franzoni, & Rossi- Lamastra, 2015; Gerber & Hui, 2013; Mollick, 2014). In 2019 the global transaction value in the crowdfunding segment amounted to US $6923.6 million, and is expected to show an annual growth rate of 14.7% and grow to almost US$12 billion by 2023, with the most pop- ular crowdfunding category being games, followed by technology, film/ video, and music (Statista Market Forecast, 2019). Interestingly, Vos, Yeh, Carter, and Tagg (2007) report that businesses under three years old are the least reliant on institutional sources of finance and that new technology-based ventures suffer the most from a financial gap. In Korea, the transaction value in the crowdfunding segment amounted to 5 billion Korean Won (KRW) (equivalent to US$4.2 mil- lion) in 2015, growing to 130 billion KRW (equivalent to US$109.2 million) in 2018 (Myung & Na, 2019). Even though crowdfunding has grown substantially in a short time, the chances of successfully raising money on projects are estimated to be 36.8% for fundraisers from Kickstarter in the United States as of April 2, 2019, which is a relatively low success rate (Crockett, 2019; Statista, 2019). According to Korean government data the success rate of fully funding projects from equity, bond, and lending crowdfunding in Korea is 67.0% (Financial Services Commission, 2018, 2019). Small businesses and entrepreneurs increasingly seek to attract crowdfunding investment through improved digital storytelling (Ingram Bogusz, Teigland, & Vaast, 2019). Digital storytelling refers to online encounter communication practices through technologies (e.g., photography, video, audio) (Couldry, 2008; Robin, 2008) where in- dividuals adopt the role of storytellers and story receivers in order to build relationship experiences (Pera & Viglia, 2016). Digital storytelling has become increasingly used in a number of areas of the visitor economy (Kim & Hall, 2019b), including travel and tourism marketing (Bassano et al., 2019), travel and tourism e-commerce (Hassan, 2016), online gaming and entertainment technology (Klimmt, Roth, Vermeulen, Vorderer, & Roth, 2012), and cultural tourism (Wu, 2006). In a visitor economy context, research on crowdfunding has applied various technologies to digital storytelling to a number of activities https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2020.100638 Received 26 June 2019; Received in revised form 22 January 2020; Accepted 25 January 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: silver@khu.ac.kr (M.J. Kim), michael.hall@canterbury.ac.nz (C.M. Hall). Tourism Management Perspectives 34 (2020) 100638 2211-9736/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T