One of the variations of a chart I’ve been toying with, I lovingly dubbed the “envelope”. The TL;DR of this chart is that it takes all successful projects, normalizes them so we can use them on a day-to-day scale, then applies them to the current goal of the project and gives a dot for the beginning of each day of those projects with the goal to be above that dot before you end the day. I’ll cover it in more detail once it goes live as I’m still tweaking.

The reason I started working on the envelope chart was something I observed when folks were using the mini chart and would get discouraged after the first 1/3 of their campaign when the day-to-day started falling below the linear trend for success even though they were doing fine overall and their movement followed the normal swoop of campaigns. Here’s why.

If I showed you this chart, what would you think?

For those who aren’t familiar, how do you easily describe at a glance “yeah, even successful campaigns have this swoopy thing that happens in the middle and it kind of looks like this…” <insert inadvertent inappropriate gestures>. But in all seriousness, I wanted a clear at-a-glance “how do we compare” kind of chart.

Now, what if I showed you this new chart that showed the average daily growth of most successful projects (grey dots) and the funding line above them (blue dots). Now what would you think?

This is the issue I’ve struggled with and didn’t have a good way to describe it until now. Here they are (visually) together:

Notice the gap between the top of the linear trend (red) and the top of the grey line even in the first week, even how it continues to spread until the last 3-4 days where it slowly creeps back together a little. This is why using linear trends to project the likelihood of funding is bad. I’ve said it a thousand times, trends are NOT projections. The best use for the trend chart is to judge momentum over time which is why the updated trend-specific chart has the day-to-day movement.

My goal in using the trend chart initially was to give projects a tool to encourage backers to reach daily manageable goals and have some tool that broke it down day to day instead of shooting for a large unobtainable number, and while I’ve heard wonderful feedback that it’s helped folks – at the same time I’ve gotten frustrated comments from folks who think it’s a bad thing too because people who don’t know any better assume it’s a projection of the final outcome.

As much as I’ve tried to educate to the contrary, it’s done little to change the perception as people keep tweeting the trend # as a projection nearly every day. It feels impossible educating folks to the contrary, so I’ve decided to just stop using the trending number front-and-center all together because people continue to assume regardless – and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The only thing I’m struggling with at the moment is (a) is the grey line descriptive enough on it’s own without being confusing and (b) what would people like to see in the upper right hand corner for the summary? Funding Percentage? Days left? Distance from success average? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and the project above funded masterfully. Well done Michael Brown & team:

Adam is big into board games (raise your hand if you’re surprised to hear this, especially after the Super Duper Birthday Giveaway), and while I love playing them, personally backing most board games on Kickstarter seems a little redundant since we share the same game closet. So, it took a while before I found that first project worth creating my own Kickstarter account and pulling out my wallet for.

The first project I ever backed on Kickstarter was Cheese Cave & Cheesemaking Classes at the Little Brown Farm. Adam had just started featuring projects that were So Close to funding that it would be a shame if they didn’t, and project owner Vicky Brown from the Little Brown Farm was one of his first So Close interviews. Now, why would a woman in Columbus, Ohio back a project for a goat farm and cheese cave in Seattle, Washington that she’s likely to never see? Believe me, my choice was quite a surprise to me too, especially considering that I’m a musician and a closet geek. You’d think some music, art or technology project would have been the one to reel me in, but nope. I fell for the goat farm on the other side of the country. This quote from the interview is pretty much what hooked me.

Kicktraq: So what about you? What inspired you to begin creating an actual micro-creamery operation?

I am a former CFO. I have worked in the technology sector and for a public relations firm. I led a very stress-centric life… and then I met goats.

I too have led a very stress-centric life of at least moderate success, and let me tell you… I WANT TO MEET GOATS! Who doesn’t want that kind of life-changing epiphany that completely redefines how you view yourself, your success, and the world around you? Vicky’s story felt like my own story, and as a result I was desperate to be part of the Little Brown Farm’s success and Vicky’s transition from rat race to happy goat herder. Somehow, from 2,400 miles away and having never once been to Seattle, I claimed a part of that community and its success (or failure) as my own.

Since then, I’ve backed a few other projects, and in so doing I’ve started to notice a pattern: Over 50% of the projects that I’ve backed so far are what I would consider to be community projects, and none of them are for the community where I live. I think this is because Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general are changing my perception of community, from something defined by my location or occupation to something far more global, defined only by our collective willingness to connect and work toward the common good – whether it’s in support of an All-Girls Chess and Science Festival in Arizona, a community kitchen in Massachusetts that’s hoping to fill the hearts and bellies of the local masses with art and music and fresh-cooked meals made from wholesome ingredients gleaned from dumpsters, or a fun conceptual art project that sends Meme’d coffee mugs around the world for people to share.

What about you? What projects, if any, have you backed that surprised you or brought you to some new understanding of yourself and what’s important in your world? Is there some way Kicktraq can help you find and track those types of projects better? Let us know. Adam will be the first to tell you that he really built Kicktraq for himself, and that he’s “just happy so many of you like using it too.” So, tell us how we can improve your user experience and enable you to better find your own sense of community through crowdfunding.

Due to our recent visit to PAX East and all the amazing games we saw there, I’m inclined to explain it as follows:

Imagine your project as a hero, with lots and lots of backers (sidekicks). But what if none of your sidekicks are Kicktraq users? Will your project (hero) be wildly successful? Maybe. Will it wind up on the Kicktraq Hotlist? Probably not. To hit the Kicktraq Hotlist, your hero must first battle and defeat some villains:

“The Bumbler” – Is your Kickstarter page getting a lot of traffic? If so, that’s great! Are any of those backers Kicktraq users? If not, The Bumbler is going to defeat your efforts to hit our Hotlist. The Kicktraq Hotlist is based on the popularity of Kickstarter projects within the Kicktraq community. To beat The Bumbler and obtain the Kicktraq Hotlist brass ring, your hero is going to need to be sure your sidekicks are also Kicktraq users. You can do that a few ways:

1. Share one of our dynamic charts and/or show your users how they can embed Kicktraq charts for any Kickstarter project (including yours, of course) on any website where they think your potential backers may find it

2. Link to your Kicktraq project page

3. Share your project’s latest funding status through our social sharing features right within your Kicktraq project page

4. Encourage your users to install the Kicktraq plugins for Chrome or Firefox, which embeds one of the charts for each project right on the top of its Kickstarter project page, and encourages users to visit your Kicktraq project page for additional news and statistics.

The key to beating The Bumbler in your quest to hit the Kicktraq Hotlist is to keep your backers – er, sidekicks engaged. Help us help you do that by encouraging them to be Kicktraq users.

“Mucilaginous” – In our Hotlist calculations, momentum is a minion whose loyalties are up for grabs. Your project’s momentum may jump high due to a spike in pledge and backer count on a given day, but if you don’t sustain that momentum from one day to the next, your hero may be punished. Think of momentum as a +/- bonus to traffic – It’s not about the count of sidekicks or pledges your hero has gained on a given day, it’s about change from one day to the next. Did your momentum go up from yesterday? Or down? This bonus allows smaller projects to defeat The Bumbler (since they’d never have as much traffic as the bigger, more famous heroes) by giving small projects a slight handicap in their quest for Hotlist status since their scale is smaller.

“Das Übah Hipstah” – To achieve Hotlist status, your hero must beat the other active projects in a popularity contest. Popularity is judged by comments on your page as a percentage of your backers. If you and your backers are chattin’ it up, whether in harmony or controversy, you will win the popularity contest. That’s right, lots of controversial chatter on your Kickstarter comment page is equally as effective as lots of harmonious chatter between you and your backers when aiming for Kicktraq Hotlist status.

Das Übah Hipstah is beaten solely on quantity of comments as a percentage of your backer population, not the content of those comments (hey, who are we to judge?). This is why you sometimes see projects like Lore or the project about the 9 Year-old’s RPG camp tuition jump high enough to be noticed on the Kicktraq Hotlist.

While news about your hero doesn’t count directly toward your project’s popularity, it may drive backers to your page, who may then comment (or even better, back you), thus impacting your popularity (and momentum). If your hero is being written about by the press, then you’re more likely to be considered popular by both existing and prospective backers. And since Kicktraq now consolidates project and crowdfunding news on our landing page with links to referenced projects, backers who use Kicktraq can see all of your news and project updates right on your Kicktraq project page, not to mention prospective backers who might find you through our home page. (Did our Kicktraq Gnomes miss some news about your project? Just click the link at the bottom of any project page to submit additional news links.)

Final Battle:

Unless your hero defeats both The Bumbler and Das Übah Hipstah, you’ll never make the Hotlist, and Mucilaginous can work both for and against your hero – Allowing for small projects on the rise to break through the noise of the popular kids or sending them to the path of non-Hotlist mediocrity when they stall.

But, when you defeat them all, they actually work together to help your backers stay engaged with your campaign by knowing where to go and how to share, and they keep your campaign accelerating to your goal and beyond.

Ad Development 101

We used to do a lot of ad development for our ad clients, but alas, the code monkey is working furiously on the next site update and the gnomes just don’t have those kind of skills. But whether you’re paying a professional or developing your ad yourself, here are some general rules of thumb to follow based on our experience with ads that have or have not had a high click-through rate on our site.

1. Point out the benefits of your project quickly. This is good advice for any ad, but especially for ads on Kicktraq. Our general rotation ads are tiny (930×80 pixels). On purpose. We’re aiming for effective, not annoying. That doesn’t leave you much space to get wordy, so you’re going to need to come up with a clever combination of words and/or images to communicate the benefits of whatever you’re peddling with nothing more than a glance.
2. Include a call to action. You’d be amazed how many ads we get that don’t include this. If you want people to click through to your project to become a backer, you must tell or show them something that arouses their curiosity or otherwise equates to ‘click here and become a backer now’. That said, include only one call to action. Less is more. Concise content is key. You can reel ‘em in to those over-funding goals after they’ve clicked through to your Kickstarter page (or by refreshing your ad after it’s funded).
3. Avoid clutter. The more “white space” you leave around your call to action, the more prominent it will be. Clutter that call to action up with other text and graphics and watch your message (and click-through rate) get totally lost in the noise.
4. Use complimentary and contrasting colors. This will be specific to the site you choose, but as an example, our site is yellow. Using a muted background color for your ad that is on the opposite side of the color wheel from yellow will make your ad stand out from our page. That’s a good thing. Sometimes on brightly colored sites, using little color at all (or even white) is actually better than trying to out-bold the already bold colors that your ad is competing with for attention. That covers the basic ad, but what about your call to action? Using a bold color that contrasts with the background color of your ad for your call to action will make that stand out even further. (Example: Let’s say you choose a muted shade of aqua for your ad background on our yellow site; a bold orange would be an excellent choice for your call to action.)
5. Be aware of your surroundings On our site, it’s a bad idea to use yellow in your ad because it will just look like a hole in the page. The cognitive disconnect will convey “something is broken” when people see it at first glance. Watch for this kind of thing where you advertise. If their primary color is purple, or grey, or whatever – try and avoid it as you want to pop out, not blend in.
6. Include a Kickstarter button showing that your project is available now and when it ends so that potential backers will instantly have the sense of urgency associated with Kickstarter projects.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing is a great way to maximize your marketing dollars. The concept is simple: develop two ads that are similar except for one or two variations that might impact a backer’s behavior and ultimate click-through. If it’s within your budget, run two versions simultaneously for a week to see which one does better, then run the one that achieved the better conversion the remainder of your available time.

Quality Assets

Last but not least, let’s talk about your (ahem!) assets. You as a project owner have invested all this time and effort into coming up with a great idea, and you’re taking the time to pull a Kickstarter campaign together. Maybe you’ve invested in artists to create logos or photographers to create product images. Perhaps you’ve hired a web developer to make fancy website. That’s all awesome. But if you haven’t thought about creating the appropriate assets to get people to click on an advertisement (on your site or ours), you’re going to have a bad time when it comes to creating a successful ad campaign.

If you’re paying a professional to help develop and promote your brand, be sure you end up with assets like high quality digital images and vector logos to use (rather than rasterized images, which quickly become pixelated when they’re being resized for your ads). Sometimes for a small fee in addition to what you’re already paying them, they can come up with example ads that you can easily repurpose based on your brand message and topical focus.

Having a brand message to tie your whole campaign together is vital. Even (especially?) small campaigns need a core brand message that quickly gets to the point of why their product or project is relevant and important to backers.

Your ad is going to get one glance from a prospective backer. Make it count.

A short aside for a quick disclaimer – Kicktraq provides sponsorship opportunities for projects, but that’s not the main topic of this article. Please, please, please take the time to do some research so that you’ll get the most out of your time and money. Whatever advertising dollars you do spend are too important to not spend them wisely, especially if you’re on a tight budget. Kicktraq is about enabling your success, so the most important lesson from this and all of our posted Tips is: Do your homework, whether that leads to advertising with us or not!

When should I advertise, and why?

First and foremost, if you’ve waited until the last week of your campaign, you’re only 25% funded, and now you’re panicking about where to advertise to try and save your project - just stop. Stop right there. There’s no need to panic, because in all honesty you probably shouldn’t be advertising anywhere. We see this all too often and we completely understand. You’re in freak-out mode trying to do anything you can to save your baby. We get it and we tell this to folks all the time – you’d do better to do your own pound-the-pavement campaign and start reaching out to folks directly (or cancel and relaunch your project with a stadium full of backers cheerleading you on at the start of your second campaign) since it’s unlikely that any last-minute, unplanned advertising campaign will make a big difference. Don’t let anyone scam you out of your limited funds promising to help save your campaign in the 11th hour. That’s not what advertising dollars for crowdfunding campaigns should really be used for (at least not that alone). If folks are walking in the door but not ordering off the menu, maybe it’s time to sit down and evaluate your choices as a restaurant. No amount of bigger, louder, costlier billboards touting the amazing ambiance and selection at your restaurant will change the behavior of those potential backers if they’re present but not forking over the funding. Their money is important too!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, advertising can perform a few functions in your campaign – it can (A) boost your initial rush to get you as close to your goal as possible at the beginning of your campaign, it can (B) help bolster your campaign during the normal lull period after the first 1/4 of your campaign has run its course, and (C) advertising can reinforce a change in the perception or focus of your campaign.

The benefits of early campaign ads are obvious. If you’ve done your homework in advance, you should have a sizable portion of your fan-base ready to pledge on day-1. Advertising at the beginning of your project can help supplement that exposure by announcing that your project is officially live and by giving your current fan-base something to share as your advocates. We’ve talked about this before. If you enable your backers to spread the word for you with quality, sharable campaign assets, your backers will to try to get new backers interested and engaged early on. They love your project almost as much as you do, so if you give them the tools to share it, your backers can hit your project out of the park in the first week! And let’s face it, the earlier you have folks come on board, the easier your job becomes down the line. However, if you don’t fund in the first week, don’t stress. Data shows that projects that are at least 30% funded early on, we find especially before your halfway point, are likely to succeed.

Mid-campaign ads should target those backers who might not have heard about you and who you might not otherwise be able to engage to share your unique idea. These folks will help smooth out that drop off in activity after your lovable, loyal fan-base has already done its job. We’ll talk about where to find these new people and the importance of really knowing your target audience a little later in the article.

Focus ads are helpful when you find out that what people are interested in about your project isn’t exactly what you thought it would be. For example, let’s imagine that after running your campaign for a couple of weeks you find out that backers of your BreakfastBot home automation project care more about the app and its scheduling functionality than your original project focus, the device you plug into the wall. Both the app functionality and the devices were part of your original project plan, but your backers are really focused on the benefits of the app and all of your ads are focused on the beauty and benefits of the devices. Advertising gives you a chance to adjust your focus and the perception of your project’s benefits by keying in on what the backers are telling you they actually find beneficial, which may help you to better connect with potential backers who are learning about your project via your ads.

Where should I Advertise?

If you’ve done your homework, this is a question you should already have some answers to; however, some places you might want to advertise might not be completely obvious. If anything, choosing the most nebulous route like Google Ads and trying to juggle keywords or some generic advertisement network is probably not your best bet. There are much more focused ways to spend that money of yours. The key is: know thy target customer! (Bazaar Kicktraq trivia: we give our target customers names… and faces since they’re often based on people we actually know. It’s much easier to figure out what drives target customers “Chris” and “Brandie” when you can sit down with them over board games and Perrier and just ask them.)

For example, let’s go back to our BreakfastBot project. So, we have our little set of gadgets that are used to automate turning on appliances so your toaster makes you toast, your juicer makes your fresh OJ, and your coffee maker percolates your favorite cup of Joe at the push of a button from your smart phone in bed in the morning. Should you advertise on a large gadgety blog with lots of other gadgety things? Possibly. But what if you could find a blog about lovers of fresh juiced OJ in the morning? What about finding a home automation forum? Or maybe a newsletter for folks who are dedicated to having their morning coffee before they leave the house? Don’t be afraid to think outside the box a little because there will likely be very little specific competition in those targeted forums vs being drowned out as just another gadget among hundreds of others that were released that week.

But what if you have a local project that people outside your community may not be interested in? First off, don’t box yourself in too much. Mrs. Kicktraq and I have both personally backed projects like a goat farm in Seattle which we’ll probably never see with our own eyes nor will we ever likely get to enjoy products from their lovely new cheese cave. You may be surprised how large your “community” is. People all over are probably passionate about the thing that you’re passionate about. Just because you have a local brewery, don’t assume beer lovers from around the globe might not be willing to contribute.

Of course, a local focus can pose its own challenges. Surprisingly, you might be better off taking the offline approach of advertising through local newspapers (and their online siblings) or targeted business partners in your area. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your local farmer’s markets and see if you can put up a poster for your goat cheese project, or local school and family newsletters who can talk about your library expansion project and how they can help fund for as little as $10, or even the town newspaper where you can talk about how you’re trying to save a historic movie theater but you have to upgrade to the latest digital projector.

Another smart advertising option may be Facebook. If you can define a specific target demographic of individuals by age, gender, or even region, Facebook ads might be worthwhile because of the detailed granular control (and the flexibility to change or stop the ads in an instant) that their specific platform gives you. So if you’re developing a wedding planning guide, targeting females between 18-25 who list themselves as engaged on Facebook could be a good way to focus your ad dollars on your actual audience.

Effective advertising is all about focusing your effort on the right audience, and you can’t be afraid to do a little legwork and research to get the most from your advertising dollars. You might be able to save a considerable sum of money by seeking these folks out and engaging them in a smaller niche space, and have opportunities to actually talk to these potential customers directly instead of writing up 100 characters in a Google Ad, plopping it in with a few keywords, and hoping for the best – because once that money is spent, it’s gone forever, even if it didn’t net you a single backer.

Lastly, if you can, find an avenue that is flexible enough to allow your campaign to be flexible. If you find out during the course of your BreakfastBot project that more people care about the app on their smartphone vs the gadget actually doing all the fancy bits, you should shift the focus of your ad message from the gadget to the app. Your advertising partner(s) should be as adaptable as you need to be during your campaign.

Kicktraq Sponsorship Ads

Now to toot our own horn a bit.

Kicktraq ad spots natively conquer one of the known problems with running more generic online ads because our audience is already your audience. 100% Of the ads seen by the thousands of unique visitors to Kicktraq each month are Kickstarter savvy – they’re either backing a project right now or they’re looking for the right thing to invest in. You get a chance to skip right over the whole “What is this Kickstarter thing? How do I know you won’t just take my money and run?” and go right to folks who are ready to click that big green button.

Our goal is to help enable your success regardless of your project size, which is why we ask about your project first and talk about sponsorship second, and yes – sometimes this means we actually don’t take your sponsorship because we realize we’re not the best avenue for your success, even if you haven’t realized it yet. Your success matters to us. We understand that for some projects, even an ad that costs as little as ten bucks a day can be a big investment. Because you’ve invested in us, we want to invest in you – so we’ve come up with the Kicktraq Sponsorship Guarantee for our general rotation sponsorship customers. If you advertise with us and your project does not fund, even if it’s because you decided to cancel and relaunch your project, we will give you your exact same general rotation ad spot for the same amount of time when you re-launch the same project – at no additional charge. This lets you focus on the re-launch and success of your project without worrying about loosing any sponsorship dollars you’ve already invested with us.

But again, if you spend some time in advance to look at your budget, look at your focus, know your target audience and pick the right avenue, you’ll be way ahead of the game no matter where you spend your ad dollars.

Tag Submissions

Did you just visit a project page that could use some tag-love? Tagging is easy. Just click the Suggest button on the Kicktraq project page and start typing in a tag you think ought to be there. A list of all our approved tags will appear. Choose your tag from the list and hit enter. You can add multiple tags this way then click Submit and send them all off at once to our Kicktraq gnomes for review. The Kicktraq code monkey has been pretty busy building new features lately, but the Kicktraq gnomes are good about getting to tags within about 12 hours of submission. Can’t find the tag you were hoping for? Never fear. There’s a link to submit new tags both before and after you’ve clicked submit.

What the Heck are Gadgets and Gizmos, Anyway?

Right, so we had to draw a line in the sand and start somewhere. Here are a few definitions for things we felt the need to differentiate between early on in the tagging process:

Card Game – A game that includes cards that are unique to that game and must be used for the game to function.
Playing Cards – A standard deck of 4-suited playing cards, usually with some bad-ass art work or illustrations on them.

Clothing – Things (usually) made out of cloth that you wear to cover various parts of your body.
Apparel – Things (made of all sorts of stuff) you use to accessorize, including bags, shoes, jewelry, hats, so on and so forth.
Fashion – Anything to do with things that may be fashionable to wear (so both clothing and apparel items could also be tagged with fashion).

Gadget – Any electronic thingamajiggie you can imagine. The key component is that it has to have current or data or some electronic media rushing through it’s circuits at one point or another to be considered a gadget.
Gizmo – Any non-electronic thingamajiggie you can imagine. While it may be used in conjunction with electronic devices, the gizmo itself will never see any of that current.

Watch – Those groovy timepieces you wear on your wrist.
Timepiece – Anything that keeps time. (Obligatory math lesson: while all squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares.)

Can’t keep it all straight? Don’t worry. That’s what the gnomes are for.

In addition to the scores of other self-explanatory tags, don’t forget to check out the Community Projects and Locally Sourced tags for things that might impact your neck of the woods.

What’s the Deal With the Gnomes?

Why do we have our team of gnomes review every tag (or article) submission by hand? Don’t we trust you??

Yes, user number 974,278. We trust you implicitly to add content in the form of tags to the thousands of projects on our site without review. Of course we do. You’re here all the time. However, there was that bot thing that came through last week and wanted to tag all 37,000+ projects in our database with LGBT and Zombies. Quit it. It’s not funny. So yeah, until we have a way to know that you are you, dear user 947,278, we’ll let the gnomes handle it.

By the way, I’ll give you 3 guesses what the Kicktraq code monkey has been working on for our next big site update…

Why?

First and foremost, the function of the Hot List is to try and guess popularity of a project based on a set of ever changing values. Because I made an intentional decision to try and not base Hot List rankings on just money or backers, this puts extra weight on things like day-to-day discussion on the project page as it compares to their overall count of backers (so project owners, talk to your backers – but that’s a discussion for another time).

Part of the reason Lore jumped so high the past couple days is because they had a huge jump in traffic both on their project page and on Kicktraq from being featured on Forbes.com, discussions on the latest RockPaperShotgun Kickstarter Katchup, on twitter, and across other sites as a result of being dubbed “The Most Entertaining Kickstarter Project Of All Time“. In addition, Lore has also had quite a flurry of comments on their project page which jumped their comments per backer ratio, another factor in their ranking.

Good, bad, or indifferent – while Lore doesn’t have any real growth of their project, they have gained quite a bit of traffic and discussion the past couple days even if not for the most positive reasons. However, lack of pledge/backer growth should begin to work against a project when the current social/traffic factors are weighted down from lack of additional growth.

Hope that clears things up, and as always, feel free to contact me if you have questions. Happy to help!

If you’ve been following Kicktraq at all you know I’m a huge proponent of engaging, empowering, and staying connected with your backers. However, this engagement doesn’t end once your project is over. Backer communication isn’t just a tool to reach your goal, it’s an essential part of perpetuating the perception of your product and your brand, especially if you want to be successful in the future, even independent of Kickstarter.

I could talk more about the overall engagement process, but this article is focused on your engagement with your backers after your project ends, particularly around fulfillment.

So, as any Kickstarter participant knows even after backing their first campaign, many Kickstarter projects don’t deliver on time. It’s a given, and most of us in the backer community can accept this as long as the project owner continues to communicate throughout the process, is honest, and keeps us up-to-date. However, as someone who’s recently moved, knew I was moving months in advance but not to where, and who travels quite a bit on top of that – my absolute biggest frustration with Kickstarter projects is with project owners not warning me as a backer that things are going to ship until after the fact and/or being non-responsive when I’m trying to make address updates.

As a backer of over 150 projects, I’ve done my best due-diligence knowing delays were going to happen and that shipping was going to be a concern by nabbing a PO BOX and redirecting projects delivering after a certain date to that PO BOX because I had no idea what my new address was going to be. However, some projects were delayed significantly from their original shipping dates and I either didn’t catch them all and they shipped with no warning, they shipped to the wrong address even after confirming a change, or the project owner hasn’t been responsive in acknowledging an address change or expected shipping method at all.

This isn’t just one project. I’ve had this experience with almost a dozen projects over the last two months, and that’s a really big problem for me as a backer.

I know better than most that Kickstarter makes it a huge pain in the rear for backers to go back and figure out which projects have what addresses. This is something I feel they could do a better job of from a platform perspective knowing delays are common, if not inevitable. If Kickstarter provided a split survey or decoupled the shipping address from the survey and the project could download an updated shipping list at the point of shipping, I feel that might work better.

Some project owners have gone so far as to develop their own “pledge managers” to help mitigate the problem. Kickstarter has gotten better about providing a way for backers to see the survey for each funded project by going back to the project and clicking the “your response” link. But the way the survey system currently works, with project owners having only one shot at getting all bits of information, it creates havoc for those of us who back lots of projects and happen to move or need an alternate address for the week we’ll be attending a conference, which is inevitably when everything seems to ship.

Needless to say it’s been rather frustrating.

How can I be a better project owner?

First and foremost, you have to accept a certain level of frustration is coming because fulfillment will probably be the hardest part of your process, even more than the actual campaign itself. Regardless, and you’ve heard me say it over and over, stay engaged with those backers. We want to know, we want to understand, & we want to help. We, as backers, want to be a part of the process – both its successes and its challenges. That’s why we gave you our shekels in the first place. Let us know what’s going on, and if there are ways we can help (like updating our shipping addresses before you ship packages), help us do that for you and for us.

Also, for some reason, there will always be backers who will not respond to surveys, emails, phone calls, carrier pigeons, smoke signals – they won’t respond to you at all and it’s going to drive you bonkers. I have no idea why this happens, but it happens with nearly every project according to project owners I’ve worked with, and there’s not much you can do about it. You’ll use every means to contact them and they’ll never respond. Who knows why? Just be mentally prepared and don’t assume the rest of us want to disengage.

Here’s what your backers want to know after you project closes – these are the things you should update us on as soon as things change:

WHO: You should have already researched fulfillment way before you even launched your project. If the whole process of fulfillment seems overwhelming, find a competent company to do it for you and find out who  backers can contact in the event that there is an issue, and if that person is you or them directly.

However, don’t be intimidated to DIY your fulfillment. If you’re fulfilling it yourself, you may be surprised that shipping companies can be pretty easy to work with if you’ve done your research on box sizes, weights, possible volumes, and time frames. Places like USPS even send people to you to talk to you about these professional services. It may be a lot of work, but it could save you quite a bit in the long run.

WHEN: Give your backers some advanced warning that fulfillment is coming near the time when it’s actually coming. Give backers that opportunity to have the “oh crap” moment where they realize the address they submitted might be wrong, possibly explain how to check their address in their survey, provide an avenue for them to change it, and give a cut-off date (with a couple day buffer) for your own sanity.

Just keep in mind the change process is painful for you and your backers, so have a little patience with them and they’ll be patient with you.

HOW: Tell backers which service(s) you are using to send their packages & be educated on your shipping methods. If I give you a PO BOX and you’re sending FedEx, you’re going to have an issue and despite all the research you’ve done, you might not know it until the box is already out the door. Your backers may already know these conflicts from experience so don’t discount their help by hiding who you’re shipping with and you can avoid those headaches in advance. Also, it may be worthwhile to pay a little extra for tracking. You don’t have to share that with all the backers as that brings its own set of frustrations, but if something DOES happen, you have a method to at least find out what is going on and where something may be (and be able to address packages that backers say they didn’t get). Also, when you send using a service like USPS and FedEx, if an address issue comes up AFTER it’s sent, you can provide the tracking data to a backer and have them redirect the package to the correct address all on their own.

How can I be a better backer?

The best thing you can do as a backer is to plan accordingly and have reasonable expectations. Your projects will be delayed, if there is even a possibility that you are moving, find a tertiary location to redirect packages to. It doesn’t have to be a PO BOX like I used, but possibly a friend or family member wouldn’t mind being your temporary drop point for your rewards.

Also, if the project owner is doing their best to manage the shipping process, give them a little slack and be a little patient. Packages take time, and shipping is terrible. Things get damaged, delayed, or never show up at all and sometimes nobody knows why. Most project owners want to help you and it’s not their fault if the shipping company drop-kicked your fragile box of arduino shields or put your new board game on your porch in the rain in a puddle.

Conclusion

So again, my dear project owners, as a backer I’ll help you if you’ll help me. Just let me know. That’s all we as backers ask! Now, to go figure out where one of my packages may be… (I wish I were kidding).

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been quietly adding new features to the site over the past couple of weeks, like…

RSS Feeds

You asked, we listened.

Folks have been asking for ways to subscribe for ages, so we went ahead and created feeds for just about everything. Now you can get the latest projects in your favorite categories and get in on those discounted early backer levels, see the items ending soonest so you don’t miss out, or just see what the latest KickingItForward projects are out there.

Now you can nab the latest feed directly from the top of any project page, specialty category, or just jump to the subscription page and pick your poison.

Hotlist Updates

With more suggestions from you fine folks, and some features I’ve been wanting to implement, a new streamlined Hot List has emerged – now with 274% more images! Ok, I made up that last bit, but we did add project images for you along side the rank so you get that nice visual pairing when tracking your project.

Also, we’ve re-arranged some of the data and added both funding percentage and goal information so you can see it at a glance without having to go all the way to the project page.

We’ve thought about RSS feeds for the hotlist, but we’re not sure if folks would find that useful with as fluid as the hotlist can be. Let me know what you think.

Advanced Search Beta

A couple months ago I wanted to find some playing card projects in a specific category and realized I couldn’t easily accomplish this and realized I needed a more robust search tool. However, in lieu of a big menacing “advanced search” form, I wanted to go more the google/gmail route and just add in search operators to perform more advanced searches.

So, I’ve been playing with various advanced search and sort tags in the search tool for awhile now, and decided I should share them with you. So, I’ve taken out the more experimental ones and released the first round of beta tags with you to play with.

I’ll be adding more as we go along hopefully soon, but I’m trying to get a big set of features wrapped up and released by the end of the month before embarking on beefing up the search tool.

Status Tags

Status searches use the prefix “is:” with the status directly after the colon, like is:closed or is:active.

For example, to find card projects that are closed, try…  card is:closed  or to find all successfully funded and closed arduino projects, try…  arduino is:closed is:successful

The list of available status tags currently are: closed, active, successful (includes active and funded), canceled (canceled by project owner), suspended (canceled by Kickstarter), and deleted

Category Searches

Category searches are easy too and just use the prefix “in:” with the category directly behind the colon and in quotes if it contains spaces.

For example, to find card projects in the Tabletop Games category, try…  card in:”tabletop games”  or to find all graphic novels in the comics category, try…  graphic novel in:comics

With Their Powers Combined

All these are combinable, so if you wanted successful and closed graphic novels in the comic category, try… graphic novel in:comics is:successful is:closed

About Us Page

Last, but not least, I’ve updated the “About Us” page after multiple suggestions about putting more information out there about who on earth this person is who stays up late working on this crazy Kicktraq thing. Also, I’ve popped in some of the most recent quotes from folks who’ve been nice enough to share their kind words about how Kicktraq has helped them. I might break this part out later, but right now it’s a good enough place.

Uh, contests, or something?

Rollover Cross-Promotion

The most common method of cross-promotion is to rollover your existing backer audience from your first successful, or even failed project, to your next campaign. This has the benefit of rallying your existing fan base and people already familiar with your brand by informing them of your next project and how to get involved. Not only will this promote your new project, but possibly provide a boost to the beginning of your project that can accelerate its success. If you have a successful project and aren’t doing this sort of promotion for your next one, you’re doing something horribly wrong.

The most powerful way to utilize rollover cross-promotion is to chain your projects together so that as one is being delivered, the next one is starting. That way, when your backer has their shiny new widget in hand, you tell them about the next new shiny widget they can help bring to life.

But there are a few caveats that I would keep in mind when using rollover cross-promotion.

First – If you haven’t distributed rewards from your previous campaign and you haven’t been staying engaged with them through the process, and/or delivery of the prior rewards is delayed, the absolute worst thing you could possibly do is contact your previous backers and ask them to back your new project.

What message does that send to your backers? “Hey, I know I haven’t given you what I promised from the first campaign, but you should give me more money for my next one! Oh, and the new project is going to take time away from the first one so it’s going to take even longer!”

You don’t have to explicitly say this, but it’s exactly what they will perceive. If you’re lucky, they will ignore you. At worst, they’ll railroad your new campaign and publicly lynch you for deceiving them. It’s generally not a good idea to go back to the well looking for more support until those rewards are in route or in the hands of your backers.

The exception to this is if you are staying engaged with your backers. If you have a product that takes 6 months to make, but you have some other product you want to share with them 3 months after your previous one, STAY ENGAGED WITH YOUR BACKERS. It’s good for you, it’s good for them, and it’s good for your next project. Keep them updated, share with them the incremental production information, show pictures, share funny stories about the process. When you launch your next project, they will be excited to see what they can be a part of next if you’re still providing an engaging experience with the first and reassuring them that the new project won’t impact the prior one.

Second – Don’t be spammy. Don’t just say “Hey, look at my new project!”. Tell your previous backers the story of your new project, summarize the new project, share how the prior project and this one are connected. Share with them how excited you were to have them be a part of making the first one possible, and how you can’t wait to work with them again. Don’t be fake, just tell your story.

Lastly – If you are rolling over the backers from a previous unsuccessful attempt, take the time to tell them why they should back you again. Why is this campaign different? What, if anything, have you changed? It’s not easy, but you need to be willing to explain and take ownership of what you did wrong during the first one for your backers to stay on board for your next campaign.

Typical Cross-Promotion

Tim Schafer thinks Kickstarter is “awesome”

Your typical flavors of cross promotion include things like having an external person talk about your project. This can be anything from a blog post or prototype review to a podcast interview. So if you’ve got a comic book, find comic book resources to review your project. Or, if it’s a gadget, hit up your favorite gadget blogs to run your project by. Board or Card game? Boardgamegeek.com should probably be on your list. You get the idea.

Another typical cross-promotion is to have someone external to your project (preferably someone with a following of their own) show their support for your project. If you’re lucky, you can get famous or well-known people in the same space as your project to tweet about you, or even be in your video to help.

Two great examples: first, Fangamer Retrowear [ Kickstarter | Kicktraq ], a t-shirt project where you can buy classic designs from their previously sold-out releases. They brought in Tim Schafer of recent Doublefine Adventure fame to play the role of comic relief in their video. If you’ve not seen it, it’s worth watching all the way to the end.

At the time of this writing, they’ve got about 20 days to go, and are already approaching 150% of their goal. I’d say cross-promotion is working well for them.

Next up, Pixel Lincoln [ Kicktraq ]. With less than a week to go, they worked together with Sentinels of the Multiverse to create custom characters for a Sentinels booster pack that will be included for anyone who upgraded to the “Bonus Pack” level. This announcement came out on July 12th. Take a look at their pledge trend and what happened on that day:

click for larger image

The Kicktraq Android

After they’d done so well and completed their successful campaign, they continued their efforts by working with different folks in the gaming and crowdfunding space to create a special release “Celebrity Pack” that, I must confess, includes yours truly.

Now, despite the fact that they made a kick-ass card of me and I could be biased, the concept is genius. The campaign is over, but you know each person in the “Celebrity Pack” will want to promote it when it’s released, and what better to do than to include lots of folks in the pack who have audiences of their own and are sure to tell everyone about THEIR awesome kick-ass card when the game hits the shelves.

You can’t ask for much more than that. I mean, look at me, I’m talking about it right now because of it!

Last, but not least, is a hilarious example of cross-promotional cameo extremes. Clang [ Kicktraq ], who wanted to revolutionize swordfighting games, stepped up their video to not only be really funny, but had the illusive Gabe Newel from Valve making a crowbar, a hat tip to the Half Life series and a little bit of an inside joke to all the Half Life fans chomping at the bit for HL3:

So, there are a few creative ways you can use typical cross-promotion to help bolster your project from beginning to end.

Cascaded Cross-Promotion

What about taking it one step further? Something I’ve discussed with folks on this topic and theorized about are the synergistic opportunities with the normal ebb and flow of most projects and how they impact one another. You can see it happen organically when a clump of popular projects pop up all at once. They tend to reinforce one another and pass backer attention back and forth. What if this effect was engineered on purpose through cross-promotion? Instead of the same project owner talking about their new project, two or more completely separate projects might work together to cross-promote one in the middle of their campaign when the other one is just starting?

I’ll try to not get all science up in here and I’ll save you from the explanation clip from The Core, but this method is somewhat like wave interference in which two waves, or in this case – the movement of two projects, can cancel OR amplify one another if timed accordingly. It’s the same way that noise cancelling headphones work, but instead of stopping the noise, we’re using the backer-base from both projects to amplify the exposure of one another simultaneously.

For example, if we have typical project A and typical project B. Alone they are successful, follow the same generic backer profile and pledge accumulation curve with the goal being the green dashed line:

normal daily backers (click for larger image)

normal pledge accumulation (click for larger image)

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But, what if project B launches 12 days after project A and they both use the opportunity to cross-promote one another in some interesting way at the beginning of B. What you’d get is something that could look like this:

cross-promoted backers (click for larger image)

cross-promoted pledges (click for larger image)

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Notice how you could feed backers back and forth during that cross-promotion period, which would have the cumulative effect of accelerating the pledge activity and cause both projects to reach their goal earlier. What could you do with 4 or 5 extra days above your goal? Can you imagine what impact just this small offset would have if you could figure out how to do it effectively?

It’s an intriguing thought, and one I’m curious about. It could potentially be performed with multiple projects all in succession, but it would take quite a feat of cooperation and timing to make that happen.

click for larger image

However, while at Gen Con this past weekend, I noticed that Impact Miniatures “Spherical D14 and D18″ project was unintentionally doing something very similar to this very concept.

After talking with Tom Anders at the Game Salute booth, I noticed they were cross-promoting a button from “Button Men” that used the dice from their project. After chatting with them, I realized they are using a flavor of this sort of cascaded reinforcement using cross-promotion but in an interesting way.

Impact Miniatures took the purpose of their campaign to fill a niche for missing dice, art from the “Unexploded Cow” project from Cheap Ass Games (also on Kickstarter), then applied it to be used in Button Men – a different game all together. What they’ve done is not just normal cross-promotion. They’ve actually integrated the cross-promotion of their own projects into a triangle between Cheap Ass Games’ “Button Men” game, art from the Unexploded Cow” project, and the dice from the “Spherical D14 and D18″ project.

I had to know more, so I chatted up James from Cheap Ass Games & Tom Anders from Impact Miniatures.

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[Kicktraq] What made you both decide to try a cross-promotion like this?

[Tom] I had one of the fans of Impact! who was also a Buttonmen fan mention to James on his Facebook page for Cheapass Games that our new D14 and D18 dice would make interesting new Buttonmen.  James posted back on Facebook that he agreed. From that post by James which came to my attention I sent a request to create a Buttonman using the D14 and D18 and James let me know he had Unexploded Cow going on KickStarter and he was the one that proposed the cross-promotion using the triangle between our two KickStarters and Buttonmen. 

[James] Button Men have always been a great promotional item, and of course they were tailor-made to sell dice. So that makes them a perfect promo for new dice sizes! Plus, anything that we can do to cross-promote two concurrent Kickstarter campaigns seems like a smart idea.

 

[Kicktraq] Had you talked about the cross-promotion before your projects both launched?

[Tom] The subject came up while my KickStarter for D14 / D18 was running but before Unexploded Cow had started for Cheapass on KickStarter.

[James] No, this was apparently on the recommendation of one of the Impact Miniatures fans, who posted on Cheapass Games’ Facebook wall, and got the whole thing rolling.

 

[Kicktraq] James, what made you decide to use something not directly related to your core project?

[James] I’d have probably made Button Men for Unexploded Cow even if this cross-promotion hadn’t come up… I’ve done it many times before (BRAWL, Diceland, The Big Cheese, and others). Plus it was an excuse to get two more really nice pieces of cow art from Cheyenne!

 

[Kicktraq] Do you feel your efforts have been effective, and in what ways?

[Tom] I would say yes. If nothing else you are interviewing us for an article on Kicktraq which is a nice item to have happen in my opinion. We both have pretty strong Facebook followings and being able to direct our followers to each others KickStarter is free advertising for both of us and that is never a bad thing. Having the Unexploded Cow Buttonmen on display at my booth at Gen Con allowed me get some folks to stop and talk about them (stoppage factor at Gen Con is always good). It gave me a chance to show them the D14 and D18 prototypes we had at Gen Con and then to let them know the characters are from Unexploded Cow from Cheapass and is on KickStarter right now. So free advertising from my booth for Cheapass and I gained the stoppage factor for people coming over to my booth to talk. That is a plus for both of our businesses in my thoughts.

[James] We’ve definitely seen cross-traffic from the Impact Kickstarter and I presume it’s been working both ways. We’ve had a great time promoting the buttons at Gen Con and it’s one more fun thing to talk about in our updates.

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Impact Miniatures’ Spherical D14 and D18 project has about 4 days to go, and is doing rather well and working towards that next stretch goal:

 

Cheap Ass Games’ Unexploded Cow project also is doing well:

 

And there you have it. A few examples of how you can use cross-promotion to effectively promote your own project or cross-promote others in the same boat as you!

Your dream is within reach! Good luck to you!