How To Get Shipping Addresses from Kickstarter Backers
They’ve already given you money. Why won’t they just tell you where to send the item they bought?
One of the secrets of a successful Kickstarter campaign that involves sending stuff to people is obtaining from them the address to which they want it delivered. This can prove to be one of the daunting parts of finishing a project, resulting in confusion and frustration on your part and those of a subset of your backers, and leaving you with boxes of items you can neither deliver nor sell—a limbo in your office, basement/garage…or accruing storage fees at a fulfillment house.
The problem is this: people have overcome one hurdle by pledging for your campaign. Everything after that is your problem, not their problem. Kickstarter exacerbates this 15 years into its existence, leaving the issue of collecting a shipping address to a clunky process that comes after a campaign is over.
Everyone is busy all the time. You may feel thwarted by people seemingly perversely refusing to give you the information that will help their lives be more complete, but it’s a matter of cognitive load. It’s an extra step. (I run an “inbox zero”; most people do not.)
If you use a separate company, like BackerKit or PledgeManager, to handle post-campaign address collection and other tasks (like letting people pay sales tax/GST or purchase additional items), folks may dislike having to create a new account somewhere else—or not trust providing that firm with their address and potentially payment information.
I have some hard-won advice that may help you manage your own expectations and get closer to achieving a 100% response rate for addresses.
For much more advice on crowdfunding, read my article “How We Crowdfunded $750,000 for a Giant Book about Keyboard History.” I’m also available for editorial and campaign consulting.
The Percentage Responding and High Touch Contact
In my own campaigns and those I’ve managed, like last year’s Shift Happens, the normal trend follows this pattern:
- 85%: The first time you ask for addresses—say, via a Kickstarter survey or a BackerKit or PledgeManager email—about 85% of people will respond, most within a day and trickling out to a week. You think, that’s great! I’m almost there. Then few people respond after that.
- 92%: In a subsequent email or reminder, a decent portion of people who filed away or missed the original message now fill in the surveys. You look at that remaining 8% and think: how will I ever get them.
- 95–97%: Despite warning backers that their item might be delayed by weeks or possibly longer, only a few percentage points more people reply. (If you’re shipping from a warehouse or creating them yourselves, you typically have a giant batch at the beginning that’s cost efficient. Shipping items one at a time consumes more of your time and may have higher fees.)
- 97%: Even by the end of a campaign, after I’ve contacted people up to the deadline by which I provide a mailing house a campaign’s shipping addresses, it’s often the case that 3% haven’t replied. In a campaign with a few thousand backers, such as my recent How Comics Were Made book, that can be about 50–75 people—or 50–75 books, packages, or other items sitting around.
- The Apple Private Relay conundrum: If you have a lot of Apple users backing your campaign, some of them are likely to use the Hide My Email feature in Sign in with Apple, supported by Kickstarter, that lets them have Apple create a privacy-protecting anonymized address for them. Apple typically blocks messages to these addresses that don’t come from the originating registered domain, like kickstarter.com. It can be difficult to ever reach these people if they don’t receive or read Kickstarter updates or direct messages.
My strategy after 92% starts to become more focused. I switch from using automated batch reminder tools at Kickstarter (where you can send a message to people who haven’t responded to a survey), BackerKit (where you build specific segments in a reporting interface), or PledgeManager (which builds specific reminder group email tasks for you).
Instead, I extract all the emails of people who haven’t responded and use a bulk-email app with customization features to send the messages. On the Mac, I use SerialMailer ($45). It’s a frustrating app to learn to use, but it’s rather powerful and I used it extensively with Shift Happens, including to send tracking numbers to thousands of backers. You can import CSV and Excel spreadsheets, create conditionals, and drop in values.
Most people need to pair a customizable email-merge app with a site that can send email in bulk safely without getting bounced by spam filters. (Of course, your email has to be non-spammy.) I turned to SendGrid, which has month-at-a-time plans of about $20 that should fit most people’s needs. With a little bit of documentation reading, you can set up DNS for your sending domain and an outgoing SMTP mail connection with SerialMailer or other software, after which it’s a breeze.
If you have a sufficiently small number of people, check your ISP’s daily sending limits and throttles for messages per minute or hour. For my current campaign, I needed to send a late follow-up to about 75 people, and I used SerialMailer to send directly through my account, with each message individually addressed. I had it pause 10 seconds between sending batches of 10 messages.
I recommend against trying to use bcc to mass email people from your personal account. Filters often block messages without a personal To: address, and most ISPs block sending to more than a certain number of recipients at once, which might be 10 to 100.
I can then pinpoint email people with what they pledged for. These direct emails often reach them without hitting filters the way that emails generated from crowdfunding sites and post-campaign sites can be.
When I get to that final stage, I then may take another few steps:
- Post a last call update on Kickstarter.
- For people I know and follow on social media, I direct message them.
- For other people, I use Kickstarter’s Message feature in the Backer Report. You can search for people by name or email address, then send them a private message. If they have the Kickstarter app installed, they may receive a notification on a smartphone; otherwise, these messages seem to have a higher chance of delivery.
After all that, you are sure to have some number of missing backer addresses—hopefully down to 1% by this point (10 out of 1,000)—but typically still significant. What do you do next?
Provide a Final, Post-Batch Shipment Deadline
You can prevent yourself from having to retain stock indefinitely. In the original campaign and in later emails, you should alert people that their reward won’t stick around forever if they never provide delivery information.
Wait until you start shipping and have a date for completing shipments before you set a deadline. Then you can email people with: “If I don’t hear from you by date, I may sell the item you pledged for to someone else and offer you a refund of your original payment less 10% to cover Kickstarter, credit-card, and storage fees.” That often shakes a few more people loose.
Kickstarter only allows you to refund people back to their original method of payment. If that payment method is removed or expires, like a credit card, you can’t refund via Kickstarter and then have to expend additional effort (and sometimes cost) in sending the money back another way.
Is it fair to subtract fees for late refunds? I think so: the fees aren’t recoverable, so if you sell the item at the same price, you’re making a net of about 10% less due to those fees. Also, I have put in hours to tens of hours dealing with missing addresses, the latter on behalf of clients who I bill for my time. That labor or billable time seems more unreasonable to recover because it’s just part of the process. You might wind up with an item that can’t be sold immediately, so retaining the fees helps you at least be made whole for the moment. In some cases, you might charge more or have far lower expenses, and you might opt to eat the Kickstarter and other fees. (If you can’t sell it ever, read on.)
There are two other scenarios to consider:
- Should you just retain the item forever, deal with the storage cost, and never refund the backer?
- What do you do if you can’t refund someone but want to resell the item so it’s not sitting in your house or costing storage fees?
On the first, most project creators I know don’t have the space or money to manage it. They’d prefer to refund if they never hear from someone and then attempt to sell the item than to sit on the cash. The refunded amount means they aren’t losing money.
On the second, it’s trickier. You promise to deliver something, but if you can’t deliver it and can’t get information from someone in a reasonable period of time, what’s your obligation? In one campaign in which I was never able to get a person pledging to provide valid information for shipping or a refund, I contacted Kickstarter. This is what Kickstarter support said:
Since you have exhausted all avenues to fulfill this pledge and you are no longer able to ship this backer’s selected reward as planned, it is indeed a best practice to offer a refund, although you are not required to do so.
In the case above, I kept an entry in my spreadsheet for the project as a sort of informal escrow. After another year—over two years after the project had shipped to all original backers—I hadn’t heard further from the backer, and I considered the project complete and that escrow closed.
What Kickstarter Could Do
It’s a very simple fix. When someone pledges for a physical item on Kickstarter, the company could process the pledge as now, to keep friction low, and then in the following step, ask, “Would you like to provide your shipping address now? The campaign manager will not see the address until the campaign funds successfully and concludes.”
Kickstarter would then escrow the address until that point. This can be further integrated with its in-house PledgeManager and be available through reports, as it is now, for BackerKit and your own fulfillment. You may need more information and details from people than their address (and potentially phone number), so a survey created at Kickstarter or similar ones elsewhere can show the address someone provided and ask for additional information.
Glenn Fleishman wrote How Comics Were Made (still available for order), which raised nearly $170,000 on Kickstarter, and edited and project managed Shift Happens, which raised nearly $750,000. Both went on to have substantial post-campaign sales.
