The Single Most Important Ingredient for Success on Kickstar
Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 5:42 pm
I have a checklist of important strategies for crowdfunding, but by far the most important is this: develop an authentic, personal relationship with the people who will become your community.
I’ll start with a clear example. Who are the most important people in your campaign? It may seem as though the person who shows up out of the blue and backs you at the $100 level is your best friend—and $100 is nothing to be dismissed, to be sure.
But as my current campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14 ... t-to-write) has progressed I realized the importance of everyone who had been sharing my updates on Kickstarter and my posts on Facebook. In many cases—in most cases, actually—they hadn’t made a financial donation because they couldn’t afford to, yet they were helping me over and over, sometimes several times a day, by spreading the word to their own friends, extending my community, helping it put down roots all over the world.
What’s more, by doing so they were helping me to continue to believe in the value of what I’m doing, and during the periods when no actual pledges were coming in, these little manifestations of value helped keep me from going nuts.
Most of these people won't show up on the Kickstarter acknowledgments, nor will they be eligible for the conventional rewards of my campaign, so the very least I could do for them, I decided, was to identify and thank them publicly for carrying a huge part of the weight of this campaign. I wrote a post to that effect, and that post was, of course, shared as well, spreading goodwill and a sense of hope, and recruiting others who may help in all kinds of different ways.
The general point—be personal, honest, open, available—applies in everything you do.
· If that’s your outlook, it will come across in your project description, so it sounds like something that means a great deal to you, and therefore potentially to others.
· You can’t think of your backers as dollar signs. They will sense it immediately. Instead, think of yourself as building a community of interested and supportive people, some of whom may be able to help fund you. You don’t even know what the others may be able to do for you.
· Ask for advice. People have given me great suggestions for rewards, for places to try posting and people to approach about funding. In social media, a question or an invitation is always better than a statement, a request or a demand.
· Admit your mistakes. Acknowledging you’re wrong actually gives people a chance to help you. Hard to trust, I know, but even as I was writing this post, someone pointed out something I was doing wrong, and that gave me a chance to admit a mistake and explain what I was trying to do, and he ended up endorsing me.
· Thank everyone. Obviously you want to thank those who back you financially, but that’s only the most obvious form of support. In this particular campaign, the most ambitious of the six I’ve done and the two I’ve helped, I would be a basket case without various kinds of non-financial support from friends and strangers, and to thank them privately and/or publicly makes them and others much more likely to continue to help you.
· Talk to people. It may feel as though you are the center of the funding universe and your potential backers either exist to fund you or not, but in fact they are all just as interesting as you are, and are well worth chatting with (online, presumably) beyond the simply act of donation. As I’ve said before, the periods between those emails from Kickstarter congratulating you on a new backer can be long and depressing, so why not engage in conversation with people with whom by definition you share an interest? What you learn will almost certainly extend well beyond the time and content llimits of your current campaign.
· Remember the second step. Your best allies are those who have supported you, because they will represent you in the best light, and in the most articulate way, to the people they know, which expands your reach and takes some of the weight off your shoulders. Which leads to my final point….
· You can’t do it alone. Creative people planning ambitious projects are often used to going it alone, but crowdfunding is the perfect example of how limiting, exhausting and probably self-defeating that attitude is. Like Blanche Dubois, you are going to rely on the kindness of strangers, and turning those strangers into friends is the most important first step.
I’ll start with a clear example. Who are the most important people in your campaign? It may seem as though the person who shows up out of the blue and backs you at the $100 level is your best friend—and $100 is nothing to be dismissed, to be sure.
But as my current campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14 ... t-to-write) has progressed I realized the importance of everyone who had been sharing my updates on Kickstarter and my posts on Facebook. In many cases—in most cases, actually—they hadn’t made a financial donation because they couldn’t afford to, yet they were helping me over and over, sometimes several times a day, by spreading the word to their own friends, extending my community, helping it put down roots all over the world.
What’s more, by doing so they were helping me to continue to believe in the value of what I’m doing, and during the periods when no actual pledges were coming in, these little manifestations of value helped keep me from going nuts.
Most of these people won't show up on the Kickstarter acknowledgments, nor will they be eligible for the conventional rewards of my campaign, so the very least I could do for them, I decided, was to identify and thank them publicly for carrying a huge part of the weight of this campaign. I wrote a post to that effect, and that post was, of course, shared as well, spreading goodwill and a sense of hope, and recruiting others who may help in all kinds of different ways.
The general point—be personal, honest, open, available—applies in everything you do.
· If that’s your outlook, it will come across in your project description, so it sounds like something that means a great deal to you, and therefore potentially to others.
· You can’t think of your backers as dollar signs. They will sense it immediately. Instead, think of yourself as building a community of interested and supportive people, some of whom may be able to help fund you. You don’t even know what the others may be able to do for you.
· Ask for advice. People have given me great suggestions for rewards, for places to try posting and people to approach about funding. In social media, a question or an invitation is always better than a statement, a request or a demand.
· Admit your mistakes. Acknowledging you’re wrong actually gives people a chance to help you. Hard to trust, I know, but even as I was writing this post, someone pointed out something I was doing wrong, and that gave me a chance to admit a mistake and explain what I was trying to do, and he ended up endorsing me.
· Thank everyone. Obviously you want to thank those who back you financially, but that’s only the most obvious form of support. In this particular campaign, the most ambitious of the six I’ve done and the two I’ve helped, I would be a basket case without various kinds of non-financial support from friends and strangers, and to thank them privately and/or publicly makes them and others much more likely to continue to help you.
· Talk to people. It may feel as though you are the center of the funding universe and your potential backers either exist to fund you or not, but in fact they are all just as interesting as you are, and are well worth chatting with (online, presumably) beyond the simply act of donation. As I’ve said before, the periods between those emails from Kickstarter congratulating you on a new backer can be long and depressing, so why not engage in conversation with people with whom by definition you share an interest? What you learn will almost certainly extend well beyond the time and content llimits of your current campaign.
· Remember the second step. Your best allies are those who have supported you, because they will represent you in the best light, and in the most articulate way, to the people they know, which expands your reach and takes some of the weight off your shoulders. Which leads to my final point….
· You can’t do it alone. Creative people planning ambitious projects are often used to going it alone, but crowdfunding is the perfect example of how limiting, exhausting and probably self-defeating that attitude is. Like Blanche Dubois, you are going to rely on the kindness of strangers, and turning those strangers into friends is the most important first step.
however, I think most of us will agree that nothing beats having luck on your side...