KickstarterForum.org

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-h

We 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

Can you provide some info on your progress to date regarding: Video plays, completions, sources of pledges, any promotion or pr methods you've found to be effective?

We've had 475 video plays with 66% completion.

Pledge sources below. All our concern about Facebook, but really it has been one of the most popular referrers. I've heard some people say they notice an uptick in donations after an update, or after some media piece comes out. Looking at Kicktraq it was hard to tell if any difference was made after the radio shows, business journal article, table at the farmers market, etc. Maybe there were one or two people who pledged at those times, but there wasn't a dramatic increase.

It seems like for us the most effective promotion has been through direct emails to people and the facebook campaign (we'll be checking out the articles about that from the other post today!)

Direct traffic (no referrer information) External 37 59.44% $4,246
Facebook External 15 18.76% $1,340
Kickstarter newsletter: Tiny bagpipes Kickstarter 14 4.47% $319
Search Kickstarter 8 4.90% $350
cherrytreehousemushrooms.com External 6 4.90% $350
google.com External 3 1.12% $80
Advanced Discovery Kickstarter 3 0.49% $35
Twitter External 2 0.03% $2
mail.yahoo.com External 2 2.10% $150
m.bizjournals.com External 2 0.77% $55
feedly.com External 1 0.21% $15
forums.e-democracy.org External 1 1.75% $125
attachment.fbsbx.com External 1 0.70% $50
Food (Discover) Kickstarter 1 0.01% $1
webmailab.juno.com External 1 0.35% $25

(Sorry, that table did not post the way it looked when I was writing the response - it took all the spacing away! It is of course: Referrer, type, # of pledges, % of pledged, pledged)

Don't worry about Kicktraq (if possible). I supported a campaign that Kicktraq predicted would be unsuccessful. They were at 45% and one week before the deadline. Still they pulled it off and with a little change to spare. Just do what you have to do to get people to your campaign page. If Facebook worked for you, also try Google Plus. I heard Google Plus engagement is almost that of Facebook. All the best. Cheers.

Thanks for the encouragement jeanetmarie!

I haven't done Google+ before, but got it set up yesterday after your suggestion. I'm not sure if there is any engagement with my group of contacts, but we'll see!

We continue to push on Facebook posts, in all three accounts (business and two personal). My wife has taken to setting goals and cheerleading people (ie, "we're almost at 100 backers, who will be #100?" followed by "we're almost at $7,000, can we get there tonight" etc) The numbers are ticking up slowly, so maybe that is helping.

We're going through our enormous email contact list and starting a second direct email campaign, this time with small groups and individuals, more personal. The first batch of emails was all the same message with people blind copied. Hopefully this will help boost things a bit - we can sure use it!

You guys are definitely above the average with 66% completion rate. Yes, direct emails tend to be pretty high ROI for the work put in. These guys talked about that more in-depth in the article I did on them: http://www.crowdcrux.com/learn-from-a-c ... ding-goal/

If I were you, I would have one person focus on the 80/20 rule (80% of your pledges are going to come from 20% of your activities or sources, in this case FB & Email) and have the other person focus on the sources that show promise, but require more work like forums.e-democracy and keep plugging away. You could also have the other person (as you seem to be doing) encouraging those that do back to recommend places to share it or to ask them to share it themselves.

I like the way you guys have divided the work (your wife acting as the cheerleading component).

Thanks sbriggman. We'll have to let our video folks know how well the video is doing - those are good stats for them to share since they've been involved in making videos for other KS campaigns.

Thanks for the ideas on splitting up the work. We certainly do have a division of labor going, based on each others' strengths. I'm a bit envious of some projects that have three, four, six people involved. They can do more work, and they have that times many more family and friends who want to support them.

Thanks for the great article on the Shut your Mao KS. We have been working through emailing all our contacts again, but we've been doing it in batches, maybe ten people each email. The article has convinced us to take the time to email people individually. I think (hope!) it will be worth it. Given our stats though, such a high return from Facebook and direct emails already, I'm sure it will be worth it.

In happy news, we passed the halfway point today and are now sitting at 53% with 8 days to go!

Great. Keep us updated as you progress towards your goal.

We're nearly through emailing everyone on our list, one at a time. And it HAS made a difference! We've gotten almost $2000 in the last couple days from direct emails. Definitely don't underestimate the personal ask.
We've still got $7452 to raise in 6 days though!