Poverty alleviation crowdfunding is a new way to achieve the targeted poverty alleviation under the “Internet +” context. Existing studies fail to disclose how the motivational appeals contained in the entrepreneurial narratives of poverty alleviation crowdfunding have impacts on their financing performance. Relying upon the cognitive evaluation theory, this paper puts forward a research model that depicts how motivational appeals influence financing performance. The research model is examined by the 640 actual poverty alleviation crowdfunding projects from the JD crowdfunding platform, revealing which motivational appeal is more helpful in impressing the backers and how to improve the project financing performance. This paper thus answers the following two research questions: (1) What motivational appeals are contained in entrepreneurial narratives? (2) How do these appeals have impacts on financing performance?

The conclusions are offered as follows: Both the internal and external motivational appeals have various impacts on financing performance. More specifically, both altruistic appeals and reward appeals positively contribute to financing performance, social appeals have a negative impact, and risk disclosure has no significant effect. The results indicate that when participating in the pro-social projects such as poverty alleviation crowdfunding, backers have more complex motivations: They have the altruistic motivations to help others and the need to acquire material rewards; overall, they do not have many concerns on risks, and they do not leverage poverty alleviation crowdfunding projects for their social needs.

The implications are that: First, the crowdfunders of poverty alleviation projects should focus on arousing backers’ altruistic motivations rather than their social motivations. They also should put an emphasis on rewards rather than risk disclosure. Second, platform providers and relevant government agencies should guide and train crowdfunders to use appropriate languages to publicize their poverty alleviation crowdfunding projects.

The future directions are offered as follows: First, future studies can deepen and improve the results of this study by collecting other types of crowdfunding projects and by conducting more empirical tests based on the large sample data set. Second, they can also deeply analyze the reasons for the success or failure of crowdfunding projects (such as the sponsor’s passion). Emotional changes have a deep impact on people, and thus, emotional reactions may directly affect the individual’s attitude, leading to emotion-driven behavior. Therefore, emotion is an important mediating variable between crowdfunding projects and financing performance. Future research can try to analyze how crowdfunding projects arouse backers’ emotion to lead to the success of the project.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, based on the cognitive evaluation theory, it not only provides a more complete explanatory framework for the participating behavior of poverty alleviation crowdfunding projects, but also deepens the application of this theory in this field. Second, with the computer-aided text analysis method, it points out the close relationship between entrepreneurial narratives and financing performance, which not only expands the entrepreneurial narrative research to the field of crowdfunding, but also makes a good complement to the extant research that focuses on information cues.