A more detailed table on the Kickstarter dashboard itemizes exactly from what sites backers are coming, breaking down the top twenty-five "referring sources." As an example, a 2012 comic project on Kickstarter called Goats Book IV: Inhuman Resources published statistics about its backers and how they came to land on the campaign page: 14.7 percent were from Twitter, 9.6 percent from Facebook, 2.69 percent from the blog Boing Boing, and 19 percent from amultiverse.com, which is the website of the project"s creator, ill.u.s.trator Jonathan Rosenberg. These data suggest that a major source of funding is people who are already fans of the artist.
One other statistic that"s worth noting: although 46 percent of Kickstarter projects are successful, 89 percent of all backers have supported a successful project, and about 85 percent of pledges are to successfully funded projects. That makes sense in a self-fulfilling sort of way: the reason successful projects are successful is because they attract more backers. Kickstarter puts it this way: "The overwhelming experience of a Kickstarter backer is success."
White knights and big kahunas Many Kickstarter campaigns have succeeded thanks to the a.s.sistance of large donors lined up in advance, individuals who are prepared to kick in $1,000 or $5,000 or more to push a campaign into winning territory. Truth be told, strategic use of the big kahuna, the white knight, the great white whale-whatever you want to call it-is sometimes part of playing the Kickstarter game. (Pete Taylor calls his big donor a "floater," and he took that backer"s large pledge midway through his campaign to give it momentum.) A whale"s promise to donate a chunk of money may be contingent, a pledge to pledge. Kickstarter prohibits project creators from pledging to their own campaigns, but if you"re only $2,000 shy of success in a campaign to raise $50,000, everyone understands that it would be crazy to leave that money on the table. Maybe your father or brother-in-law or aunt will offer to pitch in the last bit of money needed to send you into the end zone, saving you from forfeiting the $48,000 you"ve already raised. Maybe you"ll promise to repay the person later. This strategy is not quite true to the spirit of Kickstarter, but it"s not prohibited, either. It"s a victimless crime. No one gets hurt, and everyone ends up happy. The people who pledged to your project do want it to succeed, after all. The folks at Kickstarter want it to succeed, too.
Capturing the great white whale is often about the people you know. Bill Lichtenstein, a longtime player in the Boston media and music scenes, was able to convince Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band, to offer himself as a reward during Lichtenstein"s campaign for the WBCN radio-station doc.u.mentary. Lichtenstein also got lucky when Jonathan Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football team, donated $5,000 and went on a pregame radio show to talk about Lichtenstein"s Kickstarter campaign.
The partners behind the Detroit RoboCop statue got a surprising "big kahuna" message on day two of their campaign to raise $50,000. A businessman wrote to say that as soon as they hit the $25,000 mark, he would be willing to pledge the rest. The donor was exactly the right guy for the job. Pete Hotelet runs a company called Omni Consumer Products, through which he takes items that originated in movies (like the Stay Puft Marshmallows from Ghostbusters and Brawndo energy drink from Idiocracy) and works with movie studios to turn them into real products.
"I thought it was a joke at first," says Brandon Walley, a partner in that Kickstarter campaign. "But he was legit. We had to reach out to Kickstarter to see if they were OK with his offer. It was kind of unprecedented for them [Kickstarter"s single pledge limit is $10,000]. It was day six when we hit $25,000, and then I think Pete ended up calling Kickstarter directly with his American Express card." Did the RoboCop statue guys ever consider having Hotelet make his donation to the effort offline? "We talked about that: let the campaign go, and you can match after it"s done," Walley says. "But then maybe we wouldn"t reach the fifty grand, and then we wouldn"t get any of it."
Abbey Londer, who raised money for the RIOT comedy festival, had several successful entertainers partic.i.p.ate in her Kickstarter video. Theoretically, many of them could have become a big kahuna, pitching in with a donation large enough to cover most or all of her Kickstarter campaign. "I"ve had a couple of people say, *If you fall short, we"ll give you whatever you need,"" Londer acknowledged midway through her Kickstarter effort. "But that"s not happening. Everybody"s chipped in."
Despite the attraction of luring a big kahuna, many Kickstarter creators feel that widespread support is preferable, especially for the long-term prospects of a project after a campaign effort is over. Part of what you achieve on Kickstarter is public awareness. You attract an audience for your product, your film, your book, your artwork. Says filmmaker Lucas McNelly: "I was telling people that I would rather have twelve thousand $1 backers than one $20,000 backer. Because I needed that audience. I equate it to playing poker in a casino. You can"t play against the same six people every day and expect to make a profit because you"ll just be trading the same money back and forth among the same players. People complain about celebrities doing Kickstarter campaigns, and I"m like, don"t you get it? They"re bringing more people into the casino. They"re introducing more people to Kickstarter, and those people may eventually find their way to your campaign."
Meet Matt Haughey Matt Haughey, backer extraordinaire Matt Haughey is one of those mythical beings: the mysterious benefactor who will pledge money to a Kickstarter project just because he thinks it"s cool, even if he doesn"t know the creator personally. As of March 2012, Haughey had backed eighty-four projects (and almost all of them ended up successfully funded). As an online entrepreneur himself-he created the crowdsourced news site MetaFilter-he appreciates the power of the Web to bring people and ideas together, and he loves the Kickstarter concept. "I feel that artists shouldn"t have to pay for paint. Inspiration should be the limiting factor in art, not cost," he says. (Through a mutual connection, he became a "very small" [his words] early investor in Kickstarter, but definitely does not speak for the company.) Still, Haughey doesn"t toss his cash around like Floyd Mayweather Jr. Rather, he uses Kickstarter for his own benefit, and he has some specific ideas about what a project creator should do to attract backers like him. He was kind enough to consent to an interview.
You wrote a post on your blog (a.wholelottanothing.org) saying that you use Kickstarter almost like a gift shop. That is, if cool products are being offered, especially if the campaigns are ending soon, you"ll kick in $20 or $40 to get a neat gizmo shipped to your door.
Haughey: Yeah. I have something showing up from a Kickstarter project, like, every week. The site is trying to move away from: it"s a store, and I bought something. They still want it to be: I"m pledging $50 in the hopes that this guy makes this thing. But the product stuff is just like a store. It"s like, I made this toy. Here"s one of them. I"m gonna make a thousand of them if I get this much money. Maybe once a month I go to the Ending Soon page and treat it like a store.
How else do you learn about projects that you might back?
Haughey: People are obsessed with how are backers gonna find me? Most of my discoveries are made through Twitter. I have a bunch of creative friends; I follow five hundred people and have about ten thousand followers. People will just say, check out this crazy new thing on Kickstarter. So that"s the princ.i.p.al way I find out about these projects. A lot of it is just absolute luck, serendipity. I really don"t browse Kickstarter"s site too much. They send out a weekly e-mail that"s highly curated: here are our favorite projects this week. Those are almost always amazing, and I almost always back one of them every week. Also, I"m a big cyclist, so friends who run biking blogs scour Kickstarter for any bike-related things.
Do people solicit you directly for their Kickstarter campaigns?
Haughey: I"m getting phone calls almost once a day from random people. They just want help. I"ve gotten some weird hate mail, too, from people who can"t stand Kickstarter.
Why?
Haughey: The first thing they tell you at Kickstarter is to leverage your own network. But people are like, I came to Kickstarter so they would give me free money!
That"s an easy misconception to have but the first one that should be tossed out the window . . .
Haughey: A lot of people think that being on Kickstarter will automatically get them something. It helps to have some sort of network. It helps to have fans already. It"s true that there have been compelling "n.o.bodies," too. That guy with the iPhone dock who raised more than a million dollars [Casey Hopkins"s Elevation Dock]. I had never heard of the guy. He had a great video, and it"s the best idea in the world for anybody with an iPhone charger next to the bed that"s flimsy and plastic. A heavy, metal one would be great.
His video showed the product being manufactured and working. That helps.
Haughey: If I"m gonna give money to some random guy, the idea has to be amazing. It"s hard to tell people, Step One is: Have a Really Amazing Idea, because that"s hard. But the flip side is: demonstrate expertise to people. For all the product stuff, I like to see prototypes instead of just ideas or drawings. Anyone can spit out a 3-D CAD drawing. It doesn"t really mean anything. It gives no idea whether the person is capable of building it. The people who are most successful, they have a prototype, the design is nailed down. They just need to ramp up tooling or pay a factory to make a lot more.
What if I"m making not a product but an artwork?
Haughey: It helps to be viewed as an expert somehow. It helps to have an online presence. Even if you just have a blog about whatever thing you"re creating. Just so people understand what your expertise is. If you"re gonna do a photo project, show me something you"ve done. This may be this guy"s first book or alb.u.m or iPhone accessory, but what else has he done?
A person contacted me who was writing a financial advice book. It sounded like good stuff, how there"s terrible financial education in America. The person proposed writing a book about how to be an adult. It sounded awesome. But I hadn"t seen anything else this person has written. So I said, why don"t you seek out blogs? The Web has a million finance blogs. People are always starving for free content. So write a guest post. Offer chapter 1 to finance blogs. And at the end you can plug your Kickstarter. That"s a super-easy connection you can make to get your name out there.
So it"s called crowdfunding, but even with benefactors like you, people still need to bring their own crowd.
Haughey: It helps to have fans. The biggest success predictor for me is Twitter feeds. If a person is following twenty people and is followed by five people, and they"re asking for $15,000 for a book that isn"t written, they end up raising $100 and that"s it. If your blog has five hundred followers, you"re going to be cashing in lots of goodwill, asking people for money.
IN MID-2011,the bosses at Kickstarter looked at data from every Kickstarter campaign for the prior two years and made a surprising discovery: the projects that had given themselves the most time to reach a funding goal had reached their goal least often. At the time, 44 percent of all projects had succeeded (that percentage has since risen to 46). But only 24 percent of ninety-day campaigns had succeeded, despite having had more time to work their magic. Kickstarter"s data a.n.a.lysts didn"t have a completely scientific explanation for this phenomenon. It was unclear what was a cause and what was an effect. Do longer campaigns fail because they"re long? Kickstarter"s blog hypothesized that a long campaign may seem less urgent-the duration "makes it easier for backers to procrastinate, and sometimes they forget to come back at all." Or do longer campaigns fail because their creators are less confident to begin with, and maybe the projects aren"t rock-solid ideas?
It"s an upside-down phenomenon that is hard to explain. But the Kickstarter bra.s.s insists it"s true. Based on their findings, they took an immediate step: they shortened the maximum duration of a campaign from ninety days to sixty. And they recommended thirty days as the ideal length.
How long should your campaign be? We recommend thirty days, too. The Kickstarter blog shared a chart that shows the point in a campaign when the most pledges occur. The answer: at the beginning and the end, regardless of the campaign"s duration. It"s common for campaigns to experience an initial spurt in donations (Elevation Dock, an elegant iPhone dock, raised $165,910 in its first twenty-four hours), followed by a lull, and then a closing surge. So the chart is a big letter U, with a trough in the middle representing the slow midcampaign grind.
Once again, we"ll supplement cold, hard statistical data with real-world advice from successful Kickstarter creators. What follows are a few words from people describing how they chose their campaign duration: RIOT-L.A."s Alternative Comedy Festival raised $22,380 in 30 days Abbey Londer, the comedy show promoter behind this Kickstarter campaign, says: "We did thirty days. We thought: $20,000 is a lot of money, we need at least thirty days. We didn"t expect the amount of feedback and attention that we got. If we could do it again, I might do it in just twenty days, to be honest. . . .It"s hard to keep that sense of urgency going the longer you run your project."
The American Revolution raised $114,419 in 30 days Bill Lichtenstein, who created this campaign to raise funds to make a doc.u.mentary about pioneering Boston rock-radio station WBCN, explains: "If you look at almost any account of anybody who"s done one of these things, usually they"ll say, Don"t do more than thirty days. It will kill you. Or plan to take a two-week vacation afterward. It"s exhausting. I thought: How exhausting can it be? It"s like eBay! But it"s not."
Crania Anatomica Filigre raised $77,271 in 45 days Joshua Harker, the sculptor behind this project to produce ornate, 3D-printed skulls, explains his campaign"s duration: "I ran my campaign for forty-five days. I think a project can lose steam if overextended, but in my opinion it seems that advice is more for time-sensitive event-type projects or fund-raising. My project happened to be more of an experiment/exploration of the viability of using crowdfunding to introduce and share art, as well as to sell it. I think I could"ve easily hit the $100,000 mark had I gone another couple weeks. That said, the management of the campaign became surprisingly overwhelming and consuming. I was happy for what it achieved, but glad when it was over."
Freaker USA: Making You And Your Beverage Cooler!
raised $62,770 in 60 days Explains Freaker creator Zach Crain: "We were under the impression that a sixty-day campaign was the most commonly used time frame. We didn"t want to rush anything with thirty days. Sixty felt right. It gave us time to do a couple promotional parties and really get the word out there while still being able to stay focused, work hard, and know that procrastination was not an option."
IN 2009, ABOUT HALF of all Kickstarter projects launched with a video. In 2011, that number had risen to 80 percent, and today a successful campaign without a video that tells its story is a rare and special case. "Backers love pressing Play," says Kickstarter"s official blog.
A successful Kickstarter video needs to get potential backers excited not only about your film/music/gadget but also about you. If you want people to take the not-so-small step of giving you their money, then you need to convince them that you are pa.s.sionate about the project and capable of delivering on your promises. People want to see your face. They want to see your product (doing what it"s supposed to do, if possible). They want to hear how well you sing or dance or play an instrument.
"To me, the video is key," says Nano Whitman, who raised $15,950 to finish an alb.u.m and take his band on tour. "Whatever you write and all those gifts are secondary. It"s the video that makes people feel like they want to give something to you or not."
What makes a successful Kickstarter video? How long should it be? What information needs to be included? Must you appear in your own video? (Mostly people do, since backers like to meet the makers.) Does it need to be done with professional equipment? (No. Some successful Kickstarter videos have been shot with a phone or laptop webcams. Kickstarter supports direct upload of video in almost every digital format: MOV, MPEG, AVI, MP4, 3GP, WMV, and FLP up to 250 MB.) It may come as no surprise that the most funded category on Kickstarter is Film and Video. Filmmakers and videographers have an obvious advantage and usually make exceptional videos that work to sway viewers. After all, that"s what they"re trained to do. A filmmaker will often show a trailer for a movie that needs funds for further production. That"s what Boston filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein did to raise $114,419 to make a doc.u.mentary about the radio station WBCN. He didn"t appear in the video-it"s a raucous collage of old footage and stills and interviews. As he explains: "The sense was that the usual kind of Kickstarter approach didn"t quite fit, the Hi, I"ve got this wild dream-dreams are free, but to make things happen you need money. Jennifer Fox had just raised $150,000 for her doc.u.mentary [My Reincarnation] and didn"t appear in the video. She just said, this is the work."
Other Kickstarter campaigners have chosen to appear onscreen themselves, and doing so can help boost a project a lot. Some people who are camera-shy have found that it helps to have another person-a friend, a cocreator, anyone-in the shot, too.
This may sound cynical, but in Kickstarter as in the rest of life, appearances matter. Time after time, when videos feature pretty women and/or cool guys who are pa.s.sionate about their projects, the funding seems to go pretty well. This observation is purely nonscientific, based only on the viewing of a lot of Kickstarter videos. But it"s a fact of life: attractiveness can attract things. Yes, you do need a compelling project. And you need to a.s.sure backers that you can get the work done. But the cool guy/cute girl factor is no less prevalent on Kickstarter than it is in any other part of life. Some of the examples in this chapter offer evidence to support this fact.
There are no rules to making a compelling Kickstarter video. There are only guidelines and good tips. The best thing you can do is to watch a lot of videos that have worked. They"re the best source of ideas that might work for you. Here is a gallery of images from successful Kickstarter videos along with explanations about them by their creators.
Nano Whitman - an alb.u.m, a tour video length: 2:43 campaign sought: $11,000 campaign raised: $15,950 Open with a tight shot of musician Nano Whitman"s face. He says: "Hey, what"s happenin"? I"m Nano. It"s a beautiful rainy day in Austin, Texas, and I"m glad you"re here, because I"m trying to take my band on tour, and I"m trying to finish my alb.u.m. So instead of doing something fancy for my Kickstarter video, I wrote a song for you."
The camera pulls back to show him with an acoustic guitar, sitting in the back of his van. Then he strums and sings his pitch. The chorus goes: "Whoa-oa, start me up and be my Kickstarter / I thank you now for every dime, every dollar / and every little way that you always have helped me grow / Won"t you kick-start my heart and get my band on the road?"
Whitman explains his approach: "My music is often about saying something uncomfortable. When you do it in a song, it"s OK, it"s approachable. It doesn"t make people feel ill at ease. So there I was, I was totally uncomfortable, thinking, I"m not gonna be able to pull off looking in a camera and saying, *give me money." But I could totally sing it, if I sort of couch it in my style of lyrics. And when I realized, oh, I can sing my request to people? I was OK with it.
"You want to think about who is gonna give you the money. If it"s your parents" friends, they"re interested in something professional. They"re used to watching TV and movies. In my video the look is simple and clean, the sound is nice, and I felt like that was my audience. I felt that those are the people who were going to give more money. We purposefully made it as simple as possible and just featured the song." Looking back, he now jokes that the video is "impossibly cheesy."
Whitman explains that the video was technically just two shots, so it needed very little editing. It was indeed raining, so they moved the van under a canopy. "A friend of mine who"s a filmmaker did direct and produce the video as his contribution to my campaign," Whitman says. They used an HD camera and a boom mic and didn"t use a sound board. The video worked: "I woke up the next morning and I had already raised, like, $3,000. It just took off," he says. He thought maybe the folks at Kickstarter headquarters would like his Kickstarter song enough that they"d endorse or adopt it. That hasn"t happened yet.
Pen Type-A: A minimal pen video length: 3:15 campaign sought: $25,000 campaign raised: $281,989 Chei-Wei w.a.n.g and Taylor Levy, two product designers based in Brooklyn, did their entire video in split-screen, with two things happening at once. When you see how much money they raised, well, obviously, it worked.
On the left-hand side, the two of them casually describe their project. A silent demonstration of their product-a durable stainless steel holder for a common plastic pen-runs on the right. The split-screen was an inexpensive and easy way to keep the video visually interesting. It minimizes the amount of editing they had to do-no need to cut back and forth between them and the product demo. The video was put together using Final Cut software on a Mac. The close-ups of the pen were shot using a fancy digital camera that their design studio owned, but the video of the two designers talking was shot using a laptop webcam.
"We are both pretty shy and don"t like being in front of the camera," Levy says. "Our first round was actually us drawing only, and we wanted to maybe talk over us drawing. We spent about a day shooting that, and we realized that it just didn"t look good. It wasn"t engaging. So we had to kind of bite the bullet. What you see in the video was our first take, actually. We did a bunch after that. But they were too rehea.r.s.ed."
RIOT-L.A."s Alternative Comedy Festival video length: 2:16 campaign sought: $20,000 campaign raised: $22,380 Got celebrities? They can help a lot. Abbey Londer produces stand-up comedy shows in Los Angeles in hip venues like warehouses and Chinese restaurants, and she"s worked with many of the comedians who perform in the area. When she got the idea to launch a new comedy festival in the city, she was able to persuade dozens of comedians (including Patton Oswalt and Bob Odenkirk) to come to a studio for free to shoot this goofy black-and-white video, a parody of a desperate plea to help a dire cause. Each comedian said only a sentence fragment. It took five total to say: "Every other second, 847 people don"t laugh. Ninety percent of the world"s laughter is owned by one percent of the world"s population. The problem is ginormous."
"We have just over forty comedians in the video," Londer says. "Basically, I"ve submerged myself in the comedy scene in L.A. for the last three years and have been fortunate enough to meet and work with and produce shows with many of the comedians in the video. In addition, I got super lucky because Funny or Die let us use their new studio to shoot in-and comedians get a little more excited about a project when their name is affiliated in any way. It"s not an FOD-branded video, just to make that clear. Once names started being attached to the project, more and more jumped in." The video quickly went viral, first on comedy websites and then beyond. Many of the comedians who partic.i.p.ated in the video tweeted links to their many followers-another benefit of a.s.sociating a project with well-known people. Londer also filmed extra of the comics of ad-libbing material that was edited into videos used as updates and bonuses during the campaign, which also set up its own YouTube channel.
Elevation Dock: The Best Dock for iPhone video length: 2:45 campaign sought: $75,000 campaign raised: $1,464,706 Here"s an A+ video that does exactly what it needs to do. It presents a great idea that solves a real problem, and it helps viewers (aka potential backers) clearly understand that something new has come along. First, we get a funny montage of existing tabletop iPhone docks, all working horribly. They"re flimsy and plastic, they wobble. They"re hard to remove from a phone even when you shake the device rather violently. After twenty-seven seconds of frustration with those products, the silly music in the background switches to a grandiose version of Pachelbel"s Canon, and we see a soaring glamour shot of a much more solid looking metal dock. The camera circles it admiringly.
Next, our project creator comes on: "Hey Kickstarter, my name"s Casey. If you"ve tried to use docks for your iPhone, you"ve probably been as frustrated as I have." Great opening line. No nonsense. Then we see that the product is real and that it works. Maybe the best shot in the video shows a chunk of metal for the new dock being machine tooled. It"s visual proof that the product is real and money has been spent to produce it.
Freaker USA-Making You and Your Beverage Cooler video length: 5:32 campaign sought: $48,500 campaign raised: $62,770 The video for the Freaker is a tour-de-force in marketing, even though Zach Crain, the main man behind the project, claims to have no marketing training and not a lot of formal education. This video has done the improbable: it made knit socks that you put around bottles and cans to minimize moisture (they"re sometimes called coozies) seem unbelievably cool. The video is hosted by Crain, who comes off as an adorable, upbeat, hillbilly, stoner-type character, which doesn"t seem far from reality when you talk with him.
"That was actually the first time I"ve ever been on camera," he says. The video was directed and shot by Oliver Mellan, a member of the Freaker team with formal training in film. It"s not a short video, clocking in at nearly six minutes. It begins with Crain going completely off-topic, complimenting the viewer"s shoes and hair and smell. He seems like a nice guy. Then it shows the problem that the Freaker is designed to remedy: all the lousy drink holders that are bulky, inconvenient, ineffective. Now here"s the Freaker, which is soft and one size fits all. There"s a slightly erotic series of demonstrations. Then a rapid-fire backstory about Crain"s time living in a car, zigzagging around the country, working in a coffee shop, and attending a "St.i.tch & b.i.t.c.h" knitting club, where he didn"t want to make a scarf, so he made a beer coozy instead. He made more coozies, ate pancakes. The Freaker team got started. The video shows Lauren Krakauskas, a team member who does social media marketing (the cool guy/cute girl factor is clearly at work here). Then it"s back to Zach for more fun ad-libs, a quiet refrigerator-door pitch for money, and a final graphic with all the details about how to pledge. The project was ma.s.sively successful and won 2,416 backers.
Yet even with that last panel with details about how to pledge, the video left some viewers confused. "Our video got out there pretty fast and started moving around," Crain says. "The biggest problem we had with it was that people would share it on Facebook, and people would watch it, but they wouldn"t know what Kickstarter was. So then they"d just be like, OK, that was a really cute video."
Kickstarter Video Tips Here are half a dozen ways to make your campaign pitch stand a chance at success.
Get to the point.When you include a video, potential backers may not take the time to read your written pitch, so within twenty to thirty seconds you should let them know exactly what you"re trying to accomplish. Got a product? What problem does it solve? What new power does it give its users? Got a movie or book-what is it about?
Show as much as you can. A physical prototype is better than a computer model. A functional prototype is even better. A finished product that viewers can imagine using right then and there is best. A scene from a movie is better than an idea for a movie. Some special dice or tokens for a game are better than mock-up drawings of yet-to-be-realized items. A book you want to make from your years of webcomics or blogging is more real than a book you just have an idea about writing.
Draft a friend. If you"re camera shy, it really does help if you appear onscreen with someone else, someone with whom you have a good rapport. Your camaraderie and shared enthusiasm for the project can loosen things up, and that relaxed confidence looks good to potential backers.
Avoid using copyrighted material. "Borrowing," "sampling," whatever you want to call it-using art, videos, images, songs, and the like that you haven"t created yourself and don"t own is almost always illegal, and in a community of creative artists where originality is valued, blatantly using another person"s work will send a negative message. Legal and free or low-cost sources of audio and video content are available on the Web. For soundtrack music, try SoundCloud, the Vimeo Music Store, Free Music Archive, and ccMixter. The Prelinger Archive is one resource at Archive.org that offers free-to-use video clips.
Take the time to get it right. This is your public face. Reshoot and take the time in the editing phase to show you care. Little glitches matter. Redo the sound if you need to. Potential backers may judge the effort you put into the video as an indication of the effort you"ll put into the project.
Don"t forget to say how to donate. Be sure to include text at the end of the video that explicitly identifies it as part of your Kickstarter campaign, including the URLs for the Kickstarter page as well as for your own website (if you have one). Good videos do go viral and may be embedded elsewhere. The last thing you want is for someone to love your video but not know exactly how to donate-or not even realize it"s connected to a fund-raising campaign.
ONCE YOU"VE FIGURED OUT all the critical details, it"s time to build your project at Kickstarter.com. Click the Start link at the top of Kickstarter"s home page, and you"re off to the races.
Kickstarter has streamlined the process of initiating a campaign. In the olden days (prior to early 2012), users needed to submit a short proposal explaining what they were planning and then wait for it to be approved; upon approval, they could then build the page that describes the project to the public and solicits pledges. Now, you just build a campaign page right away. It functions as your proposal, and once approved by Kickstarter it is ready to release into the wild. The process goes like this: Build a project.
Submit it for approval by Kickstarter"s Community Team.
The project exists initially as a private "preview link," which resembles a real project page but cannot accept pledges. It"s not public and is accessible only to those with whom you share the URL. You can get feedback from trusted advisors at this stage and tweak the content as necessary.
The project is approved (or rejected) within a couple of days.
If approved, launch.
Building the Project Kickstarter"s Web interface makes building a project so simple, it almost doesn"t need to be explained. You"ll click through introductory screens reminding you of the guidelines and eligibility requirements (covered in chapter 1, "Before You Start"). Kickstarter will provide a link to their useful "Kickstarter School," which is a good accompaniment to the information in this book. Then you"ll arrive at a series of forms to fill out where you will input your project. Now it"s getting exciting. Here we go!
The Basics In this section, you will provide the project"s t.i.tle and category, your location, a short blurb about the project (135 characters maximum), the campaign"s duration (a set number of days or a specific end date), your fund-raising goal, and an image to represent the project in the baseball-card-like widget for it that will appear on Kickstarter. A sample widget will display and populate itself with the information and image you provide. Hit Save when you"re ready. You can go back and change this information later, if needed.
Rewards: Enter the rewards you"ve decided on here. See chapter 2, "Choosing Your Magic Number," for explanations and worksheets to help you figure out this crucial part of your campaign.
Story: Here"s where you enter the main text describing your project. This text supplements your video, but it"s best to approach it as though there is no accompanying video-you should describe your project completely and compellingly. Make sure to explain near the beginning exactly what your project is. You can include details that aren"t in your video, maybe a breakdown of how you plan to use the funding, or images that show the evolution of your product"s design, or pictures from your previous artwork or performances. This is your written pitch, so make the most of it. You can include links, images, and additional embedded videos as well. The story section can be updated at any time during a Kickstarter campaign.
About You: A bit of biographical information, including a photo and your website(s). Your photo will go on top of your Kickstarter member page, where all the projects that you"ve either launched or backed will be listed.
Account: Kickstarter wants to have your active e-mail address and phone number. Once you type those here, Kickstarter will auto-call and e-mail you to confirm that the contact information is accurate.
You"ll also need to establish an Amazon Payments account, which will be the mechanism by which you"ll receive your funding, if you succeed. You must take care of this step now, even before your project is accepted and you receive any funds, and it could take a day or more to establish and verify the account. This separate process is performed at the payments.amazon.com website.
You can add Amazon Payments capability to an existing Amazon account or start a new account specifically for it. In either case, you must use the same e-mail address as the one you"ve supplied on Kickstarter for your Amazon Payments account. Amazon Payments requires you to set up a link to a U.S. bank account. They"ll ask for your bank"s routing number and your account number, and, to confirm that you control the account, they will either ask you for your online-banking user ID and pa.s.sword (for instant confirmation) or make two tiny, random deposits into the account, whose amounts you will need to note and accurately report back to Amazon. The deposits take a day or so to be disbursed; if you"re not partic.i.p.ating in online banking, you"ll have to find out about them the old-fashioned way, by checking with a teller (in person or by phone) or looking at your printed statement. It goes without saying that you should follow all the careful security and privacy measures you normally take whenever you share any financial information online. You may not want to give Amazon Payments your banking pa.s.sword and might feel more comfortable using the slower method of verifying the deposits (plus, it"s a fun way to receive several free cents). Once Amazon Payments verifies your account, Kickstarter lets you move on to review all the information you"ve keyed in and to submit your project for approval. If you"re ready to roll, do it.
Preview Link: Once you submit the project, you get to see a preview version of your campaign page. You also get a link for it-a URL that you can share with anyone you"d like, post on Facebook, share on Twitter, however you want to get it to people for review. You won"t be able to accept pledges yet, but you can let people know your project is coming and show them exactly what it will look like. This prelaunch phase is a good time to collect feedback. You"re able to tweak any aspect of the project, including rewards descriptions and pledge levels, your story, and your video. Within a couple of days you"ll know if Kickstarter has approved your project. If they do, you"ll get a message saying something like this: All systems go! We"ve reviewed your project and it looks like everything falls within our guidelines. Hooray! This means that whenever you"re ready, you can hit the green launch b.u.t.ton and make your project live. There"s no deadline to launch, though, so take your time.
Remember to keep our guidelines in mind if you"re making any changes. We take our guidelines pretty seriously and ask our community to keep an eye out for them, too. When we find things that are objectionable, whether we missed them during our review or they were added after the fact, we remove projects from our site"s browse functionality until they"re fixed. In extreme cases, we remove the project altogether. That"s unpleasant for everyone, so just be sure everything"s within code before you launch! You"ll do great! We can"t wait to see your project live.
You"ll also get some final guidelines, including a reminder of the fees that Kickstarter and Amazon will take at the end of a successful campaign, a reminder that a project can never be deleted or modified (except for updates), and a warning that "if you fundamentally change your project, are unable to fulfill the promises made to backers, or decide to abandon the project for any reason, you are expected to cancel your project. A failure to do so could result in damage to your reputation or even legal action on behalf of your backers." But that ain"t gonna happen, right?
Launch! So you"ve launched your Kickstarter campaign. Get ready to work! The funding of your creative dream is officially on the clock. It"s win or go home. The days begin counting down. The funds begin adding up. Now what?
Kickstarter campaign tools As soon as you launch your project, your page will change from "preview" status to "live." You"re ready to receive real pledges. Anyone on the Web or on Kickstarter will be able to find your project page, and within minutes it may even start coming up in Google searches.
If you"re logged in as a campaign creator, near the top of your project page you"ll see four tools to work with. One of them you"ve seen before, but the other three are new: 1. Edit project This tool is familiar. Here, you can click through the same set of screens as the ones you used to set up your campaign. You can modify anything on your project page-including its t.i.tle-except the description and pledge amount for a reward that a backer has already chosen. (There is one change you can make to a reward that"s already been chosen. You can set a limit on how many of that reward are available, as long as it"s not lower than the number of people who have already chosen that reward.) You also can add new rewards, images, links, and information to the project description, and you can add or append a project FAQ.
2. Dashboard Like the dashboard in a car, this is where you see how fast you"re going and how far you"ve gone. You"re going to look at this page a lot during your fund drive.
The first dashboard graphic is the Funding Progress chart, a graph that shows how much has been pledged, day by day, in a dollar amount and in a percentage of your goal. These graphs follow different patterns depending on the campaign. For many campaigns they rocket up at the very beginning, surging quickly past the goal line. Some start with a small spurt as early backers jump in, then level off, then climb again as the final days approach. Others never get much lift at all.
Jacob Krupnick, a New York filmmaker behind a 45-day campaign to raise funds to make the film Girl Walk // All Day, has kindly shared his progress chart. It shows a common funding pattern, with an early thrust, then a plateau in the middle period, and a steady finishing kick.
"We had two major spikes in the campaign," Krupnick says. "In the beginning, like most people who run a good game with their social networks, we did decently right out of the gate. We had a bunch of people who were donating small amounts, and I think by the end of the first day we were close to $800 or $1,000 from probably fifty or sixty people, which felt great. It was friends and family and the immediate people inspired by the project. On day six [February 1-check out the spike in the chart], Kickstarter publicized the project in their newsletter as one of their three favorites. That day we crossed our finish line, which was set at $4,800. We had close to $6,000 or $7,000.
"Then it tapered off. It was steady for a month or so. I"d been having a running conversation with someone at the New York Times Magazine. That article came out [March 4-check out the chart] and we had a four or five thousand dollar spike in the last few days."
Also on the dashboard is a bar chart showing the popularity of each of your reward levels. Keep an eye on this section-if your campaign is a success, it ends up being a picture of your commitment to backers. If a reward has no takers yet, there"s still time to change its description and pledge amount or delete it altogether.
If a reward seems to be getting too popular-nearing a level higher than you can deliver-you can go in and impose a limit to the number available, as long as it"s not lower than the amount you"re already on the hook to deliver. Looking at the chart, you may see a price point at which it could be popular to add a new reward.
Finally, the dashboard has a list of all campaign activity, whether it"s a pledge, an update, an adjustment, or a visitor comment.
3. Backer report Here"s where you will get a breakdown of backers by pledge amount and have the opportunity to send them all-or just those at selected levels-e-mail messages. It"s also from this screen that, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, you"ll send all the backers a survey asking for their shipping addresses, product preferences, and anything else you need to know to get them the rewards they pledged for.
4. Post Update You can post updates as often as you"d like. They may contain text, links, images, and video. There"s plenty of flexibility to be creative with updates, and they can be a solid way to keep the campaign"s momentum alive. "I"d advise Kickstarter people to keep releasing as much new content as you can, to keep people interested," says comedy-show promoter Abbey Londer.
Your audience has access to updates from your main project page. Updates don"t overwrite or supersede the main project description but instead are viewable by clicking a separate tab on the main page. Updates can be posted for anyone to see or for backers" eyes only. Either way, backers who have pledged to the campaign will receive an automatic e-mail when any update has been posted, so don"t overdo it. Multiple daily updates can quickly get annoying, particularly to people who have pledged and may feel they"ve done their part and want to be left alone now, please.
Updates shouldn"t be spam or filler. Ideally, they"re informative, welcome little treats. The Kickstarter staff once likened good updates to "behind-the-scenes DVD features." They can be used to make backers feel happy and a.s.sured that they have put their pledge money into good hands. Maybe you"ve taken a big step in the creation of your artwork or music or product. Maybe you"ve received some super media coverage that you just have to crow about (perhaps making backers feel smart that they knew you before you were famous).
Updates can be entertaining new content. Comedy-show promoter Abbey Londer, who raised $22,380 in early 2012 to start RIOT, an indie comedy festival in Los Angeles, was fortunate enough to get more than forty comedians to partic.i.p.ate in the main video for her campaign (check out more details about her video in chapter 6, "Lights, Camera, Action"). She also was smart enough to videotape extra footage of the comedians ad-libbing about the worst places they"d done comedy. She edited that material into multiple snippets, some of which were funnier than the original video, and she posted the extra videos as updates in Kickstarter and on a YouTube channel she set up for the campaign. Some of the update videos went a little bit viral themselves. They were indeed an extra treat, drawing continued attention to the campaign and keeping fans amused.
Chris Schlarb, who raised $2,399 to make a doc.u.mentary about ice cream trucks called We Scream: Voices From The Ice Cream Underground, posted updates on his travels around the country meeting ice-cream truck drivers, and he added new video footage as he filmed it. For her project Keep Music Indie, April Smith, a New York musician, posted a midcampaign update just for backers offering a special incentive: if her project hit 50 percent of her $10,000 goal by a certain day, she promised to post a new song exclusively for them. She got the funding and posted a video of herself playing the new song. One of the pioneers in the art of Kickstarter updates has been musician Allison Weiss. For her first campaign, called Allison Weiss makes a full-length record! her updates included taking requests for a show, soliciting alb.u.m t.i.tle ideas and fan votes, and offering many video and text updates from her studio. In one update, she offered to do a phone call with the person whose pledge pushed her past her $2,000 goal (she ended up raising $7,711). She followed that with an update containing an entertaining video of the Skype call she made to Melbourne, Australia, to chat with the backer who made the victory-clinching pledge.
Updates can continue well after a campaign has been successful. After Weiss"s first project ended in triumph in early August of 2009, she continued to send updates for another nine months, through December of that year. The last one she posted, update number 25, came on the heels of the New York Times mention of her in an article about Kickstarter success stories. She smartly made it one of her few updates that wasn"t restricted to backers. It was aimed in part at people who saw the newspaper article but hadn"t been part of her campaign originally. She posted her tour schedule and offered a way to buy her alb.u.m to anyone who hadn"t pledged! She wrote, in part: "By now, many of you have received your rewards and preorders promised to you for helping me make this dream a reality. If you still haven"t gotten a copy, consider picking one up anywhere mp3"s are sold (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) or getting a physical one straight from me at " Smart.
Filmmaker Lucas McNelly"s Kickstarter project A Year Without Rent was set up to allow him to spend a year traveling the country, working on indie films. So it made sense that he had many updates after the campaign, with photos and videos showing projects he worked on all over the place. His campaign ended in January 2011, and he filed his final update more than a year later, in February 2012. That update began: "This is the update where I"m supposed to get all teary-eyed and profound." It ended: "Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It"s been a h.e.l.l of a year."
Respond to comments, update the FAQ Much of the Kickstarter ethos rests in the belief that your backers are going along with you on a journey as, together, we give birth to this wonderful new creation that might not come into existence without their help. Backers really do have a special, ground-floor connection to your project. You"re captaining a team with a common goal. Keeping it feeling interactive and like a true community is a big part of that. Because the Detroit Needs A Statue of Robocop campaign was unique-as a local initiative that attracted backers from far beyond the Michigan city-the creators felt a special need to keep everyone invested in the project, even if they weren"t local.