by Charles » Thu Sep 04, 2014 2:41 am
Friends and family members fall properly within the ambit of your core, natural "tribe" - those most likely to be willing to pledge to support you, based upon pre-existing relationships which antedate the launch of your crowd funding project.
It is far from an unknown practice for friends and family members to pledge to support crowd funding projects of all sorts. If someone loves you, and is willing to pledge for that reason, alone, then it is amongst the most persuasive of reasons. You can't develop a stronger, more relevant relationship with another human being than the relationship of love.
Plus, parents can pledge, purely as a matter of parental privilege. This is above and beyond parents being in possession of a personal freedom to pledge, one that is at least equal to anyone else's personal freedom to pledge.
To construe pledges by parents as "cheating" is to be disingenuous, at best. Indeed, the inherent nature of crowd funding is to grow one's crowd, one's tribe of people willing to support them with actual, tangible pledges. It would be antithetical to a crowd funding project's best interests to discriminate against parents, when arriving at determinations of who should or should not be "allowed" to pledge.
Kickstarter does not inhibit parents from pledging. If anything, parents probably have the most extensive history of supporting undertakings by their own children, whatever form such undertakings take. For parents, pledging to support Kickstarter projects would simply be a natural outgrowth of what they have already been doing, in many instances, for years or even decades on end.
You might want to consider not placing undue value in the opinions of others- and particularly if your crowd funding project is placed at greater risk of not meeting its stated funding goal.
Historically and traditionally, parents have held no monopoly upon either helping people or loving people. It's OK for parents to pledge to support crowd funding projects of complete strangers. By what strange alchemy of words is it OK for parents to pledge to support the projects of other people's children, but not their own?
To mislabel parents pledging to support their own child's crowd funding project as "cheating" is to misconstrue the nature of both cheating and crowd funding.