Kickstarter recently introduced the “community tab” which allows you to see:
- The top cities backers are coming from
- The top countries backers are coming from
- The number of new backers that supported the project and never backed a Kickstarter project before
- The number of returning backers who have backed at least one other project
To give you an idea of what this looks like, I’ll showcase the community of the VSSL Mini LED Lantern campaign below.
It might not seem like from a first glance, but I think that this new functionality is a game changer. We’ve already written about how you can use some of this info when doing PR outreach. Now, let’s highlight some other ways to use these statistics.
1. Researching campaigns before you launch.
If there’s only one thing that you do before you hit that launch button on your Kickstarter campaign, it should be to research campaigns that are similar to yours, and ideally, backing a few.
By doing this, you’re going to set realistic expectations for running a crowdfunding campaign, see how others have put together their campaign page, and witness first hand how successful and unsuccessful campaigns do backer communications.
BUT, do you know what’s even more helpful?
These statistics are also shown for fully funded Kickstarter campaigns.
Yes! You can see the breakdown for some of the most successful campaigns on the platform.
For example, let’s take the Ravean campaign which raised over $1 million on Kickstarter. I actually did a podcast interview with them, where they shared the techniques they used.
Campaign: The World’s First Heated Down Jacket
Amount Raised: $1,330,293
Initial Goal: $100,000
Number of backers: 6,480 backers
As you can see below most of their backers were new to the crowdfunding platform.
This could be because of all of the pre-launch activity that they did to generate interest.
You can use this information when researching campaigns to get an idea of which categories and type of projects perform well in the Kickstarter marketplace and those that require more external funding sources.
Keep in mind that just because a campaign might have a lot of backers from the marketplace doesn’t mean that the backers found out about the project from the website itself. They could already be familiar with crowdfunding, have pledged to a project before, and simply seen the campaign on a social media channel.
2. Developing relationships with backers and influencers
If you’ve read other blog posts I’ve written or listened to some of my podcasts, you’ll know that I talk about relationships a lot.
I can’t say this enough. The name of the game is relationships. Both developing relationships and trust at scale with your campaign video and copywriting, AND on an individual basis with influencers and backers.
Knowing which countries and cities backers are pledging from can help you improve the targeting of your advertisements and outreach efforts.
In addition, as you get a clearer picture of the number of backers that you’re going to have to drive that are new to Kickstarter, the easier it will be to tailor your messaging leading up to the campaign to your tribe.
If you want to directly reach out to Kickstarter backers, it won’t let you do it via this new community tab, but there is a shortcut (at the time of writing).
Simply take the username of the individual whose profile you’d like to see. Then google “name site:kickstarter.com” and it will likely bring up some of their commenting activity. You can then click on their profile from the comments section.
3. Celebrating success with your backers
Lastly, I think that you can use the community tab to celebrate milestones and connect with your existing backers.
You can give shoutouts to backers from certain areas of the world or in certain cities. You could make jokes to develop rapport in your updates, taking into account subject matter that a backer from a particular area would find funny. You can also speak more directly to your audience if you know that they’ve been backing for ages or if it’s their first project.
It could even be interesting to set fun goals or milestones surrounding these statistics depending the number of new backers or the number of people from a certain city.
Ultimately, this new community tab becomes a part of your story on Kickstarter that you can use to generate more interest for your campaign or pitch journalists.
Remember, that Kickstarter is a springboard. This is really powerful information that you can take to partner, advertisers, or retailers in the future. The question is who wants access to the demographics of the audience that you’ve managed to capture.
How will you use the community tab?
Let me know in a comment below or on our forum, KickstarterForum.org, where creators share advice and information with eachother.
I am excited to see all of the creative ways that entrepreneurs and creative types make use of this new functionality and weave it into their fundraising story.
