This is a guest post by Nicholas Dobkin. Check out his Kickstarter campaign here.
Crowdfunding is the ultimate chance for your ideas to prove themselves in the eyes of the public, but that’s not the whole story. I’d like to shed some light on the less publicized parts of Kickstarter’s crowdfunding process. Things you’d never think you had to prepare for.
Preparation
My Kickstarter campaign for a short animation project was was made to be aesthetically pleasing, suffused with art. As a film student at the University of Southern California, I have experience making videos, you can judge for yourself. I offered backers the opportunity to become animated characters in the film – I’d never heard of such a reward before, and was confident in its appeal.
In late May, I was ready to submit my project for review, but I had a hangup with Amazon. Amazon Payments is the only service Kickstarter accepts, and you need to register with them before your project can be approved. Unfortunately, I was not approved by Amazon. I suspect it was either because of my youth or the fact that I didn’t actually have a job, as I am a full-time student, but they claimed my tax info couldn’t be verified and refused to tell me what I could do to assist in verifying it.
Two phone calls and three emails only resulted in my being told, “Further correspondence regarding the restrictions of your Amazon Payments account may not be answered.” If I’d known it would be such a large bit of trouble before, I probably would’ve used indiegogo, possibly to much higher satisfaction.
Additionally, Kickstarter was unable to verify my identity. However, in contrast to Amazon, a quick email resolved the issue in a couple of days. Eventually, I ended up using another Amazon account that had been made previously. Soon, I was approved and my Kickstarter project went live.
Running the Campaign
The notion that interesting backer rewards sell appears to be true, as the $100 animated participation level has been more popular than the middle tier levels. This is the tier where I offered backers the opportunity to become animated characters in the film.
Family friends have contributed over half of my amassed funds. Student friends have been hit-and-miss, and whether or not they contributed seemed more influenced by if they could afford to pledge, rather than by how close we were to our fundraising goal. Looking back, the best thing you can do before your campaign is to assemble a long list of parties to contact.
The hard part of running a campaign is getting genuine publicity. As an artist, marketing could not be more foreign to me. I received two marketing messages on Kickstarter. One was a shady message offering ‘advice’ from someone, and the other was an advertisement offering search engine optimization services. A note of warning: If the message has no project-specific information besides the name, the account has backed nothing, and the account was created the month you started, it’s probably not legitimate.
If you are having trouble getting publicity, guest posting is a great way to get started.
Promotion
I thought the answer to successfully promoting the campaign would be to post interesting videos that link to my kickstarter, since I had several waiting in the wings. In truth though, most peripheral videos I created to demonstrate my artistic abilities didn’t generate project views, much less backers.
On the subject of press releases, almost all free press release sites won’t allow the use of images or html links. CrowdfundingPr is a rare example, but even with this website, you cannot upload image files, but can submit image URLs.
Overall, my nest promotion strategy has been to contact my communities – the groups I’ve belonged to in the past years – they’re the ones who may support you.
Conclusion
Kickstarter isn’t easy money. It’s worse as a student: sites bully you just for being young, and your friends can’t support you all the way. Be sure to check out some of the featured articles on CrowdCrux for interviews of campaign creators that can shed some insight into the fundraising process. I especially liked How to be successful on Kickstarter: 3 Prerequisites for raising 10k.
For all my hardship, I’m halfway through my campaign and 40% funded. The saying that new backers seem to trickle off midway is definitely true. However, they also say funding picks up in the last week, and maybe with some help, I’ll be back next month to report the truth of that.
Nicholas Dobkin’s current Kickstarter campaign, the musical animation project Kanon Rock, is listed among the most popular animation projects on Kickstarter, and is running until July 8th:
