I spent a few days helping Jenn get her Kickstarter campaign ready to launch. I pitched in with project management and light tasks —

• Setting daily goals
• Logistics for the launch party
• Copywriting and building the page
• Outreach strategies
• Tracking tools
• Writing targeted boilerplate emails

The campaign features lotsa rewards and styling on the page — we were very weary of losing our data. Occasionally I saved a PDF as a backup. Below is my wireframe sketch of what the backend / page builder could look like. I am sure much of this is already in the pipeline.

PDF

Week one has been a success. Early backers had backed other projects, so getting people to create an account is the first barrier. About half came on board for the campaign. I’m curious to learn more about the how and why people decide to give. I am also surprised / bummed out at the # of close friends who haven’t pledged. I’ve been reading up on links from the search “kickstarter psychology” and haven’t yet cracked the code. This Freakonomics podcast offers some good insight:

…what you tend to find is that people are more driven out of pure self-interest. And what I mean by that is that people give because it gives them a warm feeling …  if you want to induce people to give more money, you should really now be appealing to “hey here’s what this can do for you,” or “if you don’t give today this will actually be taken away and you will no longer be able to use it,” rather than appeal to, say “you know what, you can help this poor person over there.” I think fundraisers for years have gotten it wrong, that they need to appeal more to the actual donor rather than the recipient of those dollars.

SOMA (I backed them!) did a good post-mortem and shared a lot of their resources.

The problem I wished I’d been able to sort out earlier was estimating the cost of producing the rewards. My “pledge policy” is to choose a non-material reward or no reward. I would rather my money go towards the project than producing chotchkies. I started mocking up a rewards calculator, then found this one.