6 Kickstarter Tips
As someone who had been involved with multiple crowdfunding campaigns at various levels of involvement, I felt pretty confident that I could plan and design a campaign that would be successful. Of course I couldn’t know for sure until the day we flicked that “LAUNCH” switch. In truth it took about 4 months of planning and prepping to get all of the stars in place. It was only when we hit our goal less than 24 hours later I could sigh in relief.
Now that I’ve had this personal success, I’ve been asked for advice a few times on how we made it happen. There’s lots of sites that spell out how to run a successful campaign and they all have great advice. I’ll lay out here some of the more common things I’ve gathered but then at the end I’m going to talk about that one thing that helped us get over the hump so quickly. Yup, it’s a listicle… are you ready?
Have an eye catching video. The video is the featured piece on a Kickstarter page and deserves the most time put into it. Kickstarter’s own guidelines suggest that you video doesn’t have to be high quality but that it should be memorable. I say make it high both. Most people will stop watching and click away if you don’t catch their attention in the first few seconds, so start with strong, engaging imagery right out the gate. We set up a split screen that featured both of us and the moving puppet.
Don’t forget graphics. Photos are great and you should include some to help sell how far along in your project you are, but some nice graphics and typography can go a long way to helping your page stand out from all of the boilerplate Kickstarter pages. Pay particular attention to your video thumbnail and update it as you move through the campaign.
Pay attention to copy. Be sure what you are saying is clear and understandable. Sentences that run too long can become confusing. My personal technique: look for sentence with commas and see if I can divide them into two sentences. Ask a friend to double check you grammar and spelling.
Consider your rewards. Kickstarter is not a store and rewards are just that, rewards. That said, I think people are still more likely to contribute if the rewards still come in at around the price they would pay at retail. I specifically targeted lots of different price points and found ways to create rewards that came about naturally during preproduction. Also keep in mind that Kickstarter counts the money people pay for shipping towards your goal, so build that into your estimates!
Have a press kit ready. Press kits come in all kinds of formats but I opted to create a public Google drive folder with a pdf and selection of curated images inside. Create a list of publications and blogs that might be interested in your project. I sent ours out to some big names and local rags but I found that the smaller and more niche blogs were the most interested in reaching out and publishing something.
Build you mailing list. Here is the big one. Lots of people have fantasies of their project going viral and gathering way more cash than they planned, but this is the fantasy that the crowdfunding scene feeds to the public. The truth is that most strangers don’t want to pay you to work on your hobby. Period.
But do you know who does? Your friends and family do. Some of your acquaintances probably do to. When it was all said and done, a quick overview of our backers revealed that about 80% of them were people that we already knew. How did we make this happen? We personally told them about our project, and then we asked them to voluntarily sign up for our mailing list. We actually spent two months doing this. Mattzilla and I challenged each other to get 5 sign ups a day. Lots of people didn’t bother. Lots did it out of courtesy. But the important thing is that the people who wanted to see us succeed wound up on that list, and the day we launched the Kickstarter we sent them an email to let them know. That kind of excitement is what lead to such a strong start and carried through to the end of the month. And THAT is the best advice I have to give.