Testing Out New Kickstarter Features
Kickstarter has had long periods in which it has changed little about how to build, run, and manage post-campaign details. These lulls have been punctuated with major changes. When I got ready to launch the campaign for Six Centuries of Type & Printing earlier this year, I noticed that the company had added and tweaked lots of features. Some may have been in place for a year or more, but I believe only one was available when I launched How Comics Were Made in February 2024.
I started using Kickstarter to fund my book and art projects about 15 years ago. Six Centuries was my 11th! My 9 successful campaigns have ranged from raising $3,000 to over $165,000. I also managed the project for Shift Happens, which brought in $750,000 in its crowdfunding stage. I’m always looking to see what I can test and what I can learn from taking advantage of more of what Kickstarter offers.
You can still back the campaign for Six Centuries because I turned on Late Pledges, described below.
With Six Centuries, these are the features I used for the first time.
Pre-launch editor: Kickstarter previously alerted prior backers about new campaigns. The pre-launch editor lets you set up an image and some text about an upcoming campaign that Kickstarter has approved but that you have not launched. This allows people to click or tap to sign up to receive an alert when the project launches.
Featured rewards: All rewards used to be presented in dollar order. By setting one or more reward tiers as Featured, they show up at the top of rewards, making it more likely people will see them first.
Secret rewards: If you’ve built an audience, you may want to reward them for paying attention to your new projects and provide a discount. Kickstarter added timed and quantity awards several years ago, which let you set tiers that expired after X hours from launch (like 24 or 48) or after a certain number of rewards were redeemed. Many creators would label a reward as an “early bird” special and alert people through email lists, Patreon, and other direct methods to get in early. However, anyone arriving at the campaign could choose that tier.
With Secret Rewards, you can create one or more reward tiers with an exclusive, secret URL that must be followed for a backer to gain access to it. I created one loyalty tier. (For now, each Secret Reward has a unique URL; you can’t unlock multiple Secret Rewards via a single URL.) In a future camapign, I will consider offering both an exclusive Secret Reward available through the campaign and an early bird reward that anyone can back.
Individual images for add-ons and rewards: Rewards used to be just a list of stuff in text. Then Kickstarter became more sophisticated, having you created reward items that were bundled in whichever quantities you wanted to form a reward you would then describe. More recently, the company added media support so you can provide unique images for each item and reward tier, as well as for add-on items. (The cropping and dimensions Kickstarter provides for some areas images are shown is still a work in progress; it required a fair amount of trial and error for me to get it right.)
Late Pledges: When a Kickstarter campaign ended, you used to be on your own for ecommerce. I transitioned with How Comics Were Made from Kickstarter to PledgeManager from KickTraq (which handled post-campaign address collection, tier upgrades, add-ons, and new pre-orders), and then finally, after shipping all initial Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders, to my own ecommerce site. That also reduced the fees collected. Late Pledges offers a different way to manage post-campaign pre-orders. Each reward tier can have Late Pledges separately enabled — you’re not required to turn it on for all awards — and a higher price set. Kickstarter takes the same standard 5% + Stripe fees (about 3%) for Late Pledges.
Post-campaign pledge manager: I’ve used both BackerKit and PledgeManager to handle all the details of management of backers, orders, and shipment tracking for previous campaigns. For Six Centuries, I opted into Kickstarter’s beta to test their integrated “pledge manager” (no capitalized term for it yet). One of its key advantages is that you can set shipping prices for collection after a campaign is over by providing a range of expected shipping for each tier and add-on. This has a few advantages: First, your shipping doesn’t count towards your goal, so you can formulate a goal based on the item price, typically setting your goal value lower. Second, Kickstarter acts as your marketplace facilitator, collecting sales tax for every state that has it and for some other countries. Kickstarter not only calculates the sales tax but also handles the paperwork and filing with each sales tax, GST, or VAT authority. This does mean all backers will have to complete an additional transaction when they provide their address.
This was a lot to test in one go. However, each of the above scratched a different itch. I can track some of the results. For instance, I use Kickstarter’s simple referrer codes to set up dozens of origin trackers to test which method people found the campaign. These combine with the Secret Reward URL. I can see the number for people at each tier, which lets me know how useful having a special discounted reward was. Kickstarter offers some advanced analytics (in beta for two years now) that provides finer slicing about returning backers from other campaigns, which also helps assess how many people who participated in my previous Kickstarter campaigns found this one, too.
What I can’t tell is whether images in items/rewards or featured items boosted results, but intuitively, I think they enhance a campaign and thus must have some effect. (Kickstarter beta tests many features, so they likely have metrics in-house that support this.)
I have yet to see how well Late Pledges and the pledge manager perform. Having on-site Kickstarter pre-ordering after a campaign seems dramatically better than directing people to another site, so I am hoping I see that in the results.
