KickstarterForum.org

I've just heard from one person that he had 25-30% pledge dropping in his Kickstarter campaign.

That's crazy high number, so I decided to share my experience and would love to hear your stats!

Dropped pledges can happen in two phases:

• During the project, when backers cancel their pledge (the one that you are referring to)
• After the project, when Kickstarter isn't able to process backers' credit cards

Here are stats on this of my first Kickstarter campaign:

• 0.5% backers (1 out of 200) cancelled their pledges during the campaign
• 8% dropped backers (16 backers out of 200) after the campaign

Here are stats on this of my last Kickstarter campaign, where I participated as a collaborator:

• 11% backers (7 out of 62) cancelled their pledges during the campaign
• 13% dropped backers (8 out of 62) after the campaign

The reason, why the number of cancelled pledges was so low during my first campaign was because almost all backers were people who already knew me and I communicated with them about my project early in advance. In the second project we gathered leads by Facebook Ads, so all were strangers as a results there were more people who cancelled.

As for the dropped backers after campaign is finished, you can't control that much as Kickstarter uses Stripe to process credit cards. However, you can approach those backers directly and propose them to use PayPal to pay for your reward.

What are your stats?

I think one of the reasons why some people cancel their pledges on a particular project is due to competition. Some backers may back multiple similar projects but eventually choose one or two in the end. If a project is unique and the only active, Pledge cancellation could be extremely low.