We are now halfway through our Kickstarter campaign and I discovered this site while looking for more tips and ideas and support. I've appreciated the many helpful articles and am figuring out what things to implement at this point.
I hope I can get some feedback from this community (I have seen some great feedback for various projects!) although I have a food project and there don't seem to be too many of those in this forum!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/61 ... fruiting-hWe would love to hear any advice, feedback, ideas, etc.
I have seen the Kicktraq stats and am trying to pretend I haven't - I'm more optimistic than that!
I'll give some background info and try to hit the questions I see often come up. First of all, I grow and sell mushrooms!
I've been in business since 2009. I started a website and facebook presence in 2011 and have kept those updated and have been adding fans there. I've sold to many area restaurants, grocery stores, Farmers Markets, and CSAs. I've also taught a lot of workshops and I've had interns and volunteers at the farm for the past several years. All this has allowed me to grow a nice size email contact list of interested people (about 500 emails).
Pre-Kickstarter we had a story in the New York Times in 2011 and have been in several local newspapers and magazines since then - 1-2 per year I'd say.
I started a Twitter account last week - better late than never? But I'm guessing it won't help us much in this campaign.
As for getting the word out:
- a direct email to everyone on that email list (one email so far, we are planning for another one)
- facebook posts on my business page, personal page, and my wife's page
- we created a FB "event", a virtual one, to help bring in more traffic
- twitter - which I used to send out updates and contact people
- I spoke with all the journalists who had done stories on me in the past and got recommendations for other journalists to talk to
- we did a launch party (which didn't draw too many people, but it was a bit last minute)
- I had a table at the indoor farmers market, gave away flyers on the project, talked about it, had the project up on a laptop (and we gave away mushroom brownies!)
- I had two radio show interviews on the 4th and 5th
- I've had workshops almost every Saturday, and I talk about the campaign at those
- I was interviewed for a story on our local TV news channel, but the cut the story in the end. Grr.
- I've been trying to get a story in our newspaper, and on a well known area food blog or two - no luck there yet (even with introductions by people who know the contacts!)
One interesting twist in our campaign is that the other mushroom grower in town (really the ONLY other one) ALSO decided to do a campaign this month! We each found out about each others days before mine started. We did not plan this. We've been hoping to take advantage of this by making it more newsworthy; and we're sharing media contacts with each other so that has been helpful.
I may be forgetting things, but this is already plenty long. I'm just in that middle of the campaign slump and wondering what else to do to get some more momentum going