So I’ve been blabbing about Kickstarter advice here, in person, on podcasts, on Quora, and at Kickstarter sponsored events invited by Kickstarter since my campaign for Replacing the “N-word” with “Robot” in Huck Finn went viral. I totally know what I’m talking about! But the Internet is a swiftly changing jerk, and things that were true just a year ago when I did my last campaign are not true now. So while my current campaign that we worked on for 5 solid months and shot over 35 videos for isn’t totally sunk it’s not progressing like all our prior experience says it should. There are some very specific reasons why and they can help you.
I’m going to share things that people usually don’t…specific numbers, back room conversations and ultra current information. I’ve discussed these things with industry experts and people who have run huge campaigns previously and they’ve been just as surprised as we are. If you want to thank me fund the campaign! Our incentives are really good (Did I mention we’re doing everything right?).
1. Facebook Changed Facebook is always changing. “We’re eliminating your privacy.” “ We’re publishing your address and sleeping schedule and leaving your door unlocked.” “ We’ve got your kid.” These are all to be expected. The thing that’s going to hurt your Kickstarter though is their desire to get paid to show people your stuff. It used to be that if someone liked your page they would see your posts. No longer. The page for my first film The Selling has around 1000 likes. These are really good likes gathered from a world wide festival run. These are wonderful people who like the thing we made and nerdy stuff in general. Our video for Diani And Devine Meet The Apocalypse with genre superstars Armin Shimerman (Quark from DS9) and Harry Groener (the Mayor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is right up the alley of anyone who liked THE SELLING. Facebook showed that video to only 38 of those 1000 people. I’m not sure exactly how since the algorithm is proprietary information but a similar thing has happened with personal pages. People are not seeing the things that you share like they used to. If you want them to it’s going to cost you.
For some more mathie information the campaign for THE SELLING was shared on Facebook 139 times (according to the Kickstarter page) and Facebook was by far the highest location for backer referral for that campaign. Most of our money was raised from Facebook. For DIANI & DEVINE MEET THE APOCALYPSE Facebook is a far distant second for referrals and the campaign has been shared (as of Nov 4th) 1288 times. We have raised less money with a better campaign, more extra material and an extremely energized base. 139 in old Facebook beats 1288 in new by a long shot. I’m sure other people’s numbers will be wildly different but these are ours currently. 1288 shares in old Facebook might have us to our goal already. As of now we’re at 22%.
2. Crowdfunding Fatigue Everyone we know is crowdfunding. But it’s only the people we know! There are millions and millions of people out there who have never heard of crowdfunding and will love it when they find out about it. That’s the problem though. How do we get to them? We only know the people we know. And they know about it already. I believe crowdfunding has a large and bright future but the first backlash is inevitable and we may be in it now. “Oh, wow I can’t wait to jump on board” is no longer the initial reaction to someone’s crowdfunding campaign among those whose social circle is full of crowdfunding. This will make campaigns a harder sell. No matter how good a job you do people can’t love your thing unless they look at it. They’re not looking at it as much as they used to.
3. Media Crowdfunding Overload Every media outlet is constantly bombarded with requests to cover crowdfunding campaigns. Many of them now have a no crowdfunding policy. Just having a campaign is no longer newsworthy. We attempted to combat this with the 30+ videos and it’s worked. A little. Our funny videos have gotten some coverage. But our biggest article so far from a very prestigious publication that was shared many many times netted a total of one pledge for $1. It was nice to get the article but…
4. Twitter Has Changed In order to get a real meaningful signal boost for your campaign on Twitter you need people with lots of followers to endorse you. We have had multiple tweets from people with millions of followers because we have some wonderful and amazing friends. In prior campaigns when this happened we would get a huge burst of backers. Like magic! Now it barely registers. It’s not just a lack of backers. It’s a reduction in response to tweets from high follower accounts. I don’t have specific information for this because I don’t want to make any charts. It’s just a trend I’ve become aware of as the numbers don’t roll in. I love twitter and I think it’s a very valuable news source and socializing platform. I’m on it all the time. But I do think it’s a little less useful than it used to be for people trying to crowdfund.
5. Conversion Rates I have a piece of advice. Do not bother with Tumblr. I love Tumblr. It’s fantastic. Don’t think it’s going to help you with your crowdfunding campaign. Post if you have a presence there but don’t spend any more time on it than that. We had a video go viral on Tumblr and there were many gif’s made from it with thousands upon thousands of reblogs that all included the Kickstarter link. Out of those 30,000 to 50,000 people who liked it enough to reblog or heart it, 4 of them pledged to the campaign for a total of $70. Four backers is awesome but a more typical conversion rate for such an enthusiastic response might be .01%. That would have been 500 backers. Do not bother with Tumblr.
There are master’s degrees on things like this and I am not an expert and I don’t want to be but from what I know these rates are pretty terrible. The YouTube conversions are bad too, but we expected that. It is known. Out of the 46,710 views since we’ve started the campaign 14 backers have come from YouTube with a total of $285. That’s 14 great people but any creator would hope for more than that from a very respectable 46,710 views.
This is real time information so it’s hard to come to conclusions yet. I know if we had run this campaign a year ago we would be in much better shape. It’s possible that we really suck and everybody hates us but the response to this project has been really outstandingly positive so I’m not sure that is the case. We raised more money faster from our personal circles than we ever did before. But the things that bring a campaign out to people you don’t know haven’t yet clicked in and from what we can tell from inside it’s for the reasons I’ve listed above. We have two weeks left so it could very well turn around with your help! Go to http://DDMTA.com and get, don’t give. Get a great movie that won’t happen without you. (See? I can’t stop).
Will this apply to you and your crowdfunding project? Most Kickstarter projects are under $10,000 and most people can raise that within their circle of influence so they’re probably all right though they will have to email everyone they know instead of relying on Facebook. If you’re trying to raise more I’m sorry to say I think it’s now much harder than it used to be…and it wasn’t easy before.