If you are running a Kickstarter campaign, you may experience backers canceling their commitment to your project before the fundraising duration of your project is up.
For example, on the KickstarterForum, Mary Thompson asks “I seem to have a small stream of people who have cancelled their pledges. One or two offered the explanation that they had impulse pledged and were now reconsidering. I wonder if Kickstarter would consider adding a text field to the canceling process and requiring backers to offer the reason they are backing out.
Does this happen to most projects? Anyone else have any experience with this?” – Mary Thompson raised over $7,000 on Kickstarter.
Actually, when a backer cancels a pledge towards a project, Kickstarter does ask why the backer canceled their pledge, but it seems like this information is not passed along to the creator.
When a backer cancels a pledge, at the moment, it seems as though there is no way to re-connect with that backer and try to convince them to re-consider pledging
“I could ask them directly, but only because I took the time to thank each new backer personally as they joined our project. Otherwise, I’d never be able to find them or communicate with them. Once they drop your project, you have to go to pretty extreme lengths to get a message to them. The only way to contact them is to pull up the original message I sent them and reply to it. There is not a way that I have found from the dashboard for project creators to reach these people.” – Source
As another example, Michael Tumy also experienced backers pulling out during the duration of his campaign.
“I had 2 backers pull out over the past 6 days of my Kickstarter, one a $25 pledge and another a $70 pledge, however, of the second, about an hour after backing out she repledged and sent me a private mail apologizing about have once backed out. She thought there was a problem with her payment. After discovering she was in error, she pledged once more.
I responded back to her, that I was disappointed when she backed out, however, I completely understood, and was glad she re-pledged.
That said, I can perfectly understand situations where a pledge-maker might need to back out. Maybe they over-committed themselves on other Kickstarters, maybe a different Kickstarter offerred a new backer level, that they wanted more than another. Maybe their spouse was getting angry at them for spending so much money that month, and being in a relationship was more important than a backer for somebody’s Kickstarter. The point is there are any number of reasons and all are pretty much understandable.” – Michael raised over $23,000 on Kickstarter.
Should you be worried?
As a rule of thumb, if you see a consistent slow trickle of people dispersed throughout the lifecycle of your campaign deciding to pull their pledge, I would not be as worried as if you saw a massive pullback spike during a given day or week. Thompson and Tumy expand on this point below:
“The cancelled pledges do not seem to directly correlate to the level of funding. They are fairly consistent across the project as a slow trickle of people leaving. If I had lost several at once, I would immediately suspect that it was something I had done or not done and investigate that as much as possible. No one backed out right after either our initial goal or first stretch goal was achieved, but I did have one just before either of those goals were met. It is still entirely possible that the backers were leaving because they realized we were close enough to the goal that we might still make it without them. I’m still not sure.” – Source
“If backers were pulling out in droves, I’d be concerned, but a few here and there – I think that’s expected and reasonable to occur. I wouldn’t let it fret you.” – Source
Why does this matter?
The fact that backers have the option to pull their support from your campaign should give you even more of a reason to employ stellar customer service and consistently engage and thank your backers for their support.
In addition, you may want to plan to raise 1-3% more than your fundraising goal and not rest on your laurels if you hit your fundraising goal early. People can always back out and it’s important to plan for this loss of value that you might experience in the duration of your Kickstarter campaign.
You wouldn’t want to get all the way to the end of an all-or-nothing campaign and find out that you won’t receive any of the funds raised because a couple of people backed out at the last minute.
Questions?
Leave a comment below or shoot me an email at sbriggman@crowdcrux.com
