We made it! Thanks to all of you who pledged to or spread the word about our Kickstarter fundraising campaign.
We’ve had a few requests to share what we’ve learned by running the campaign, including one from Mitch Altman, a friend of The Media Show and all-around cool guy who will soon be running a very interesting campaign of his own (so follow that Twitter feed!) I wrote up a good chunk for Mitch, then figured that it would be another good addition to the extensive documentation we’ve done of the show. So I’m posting my rough postmortem of the campaign here.
First of all, I read this before I got started, and it was useful. Good statistics about who pledged and how much on one particular project.
That article says you should have good $50 and $100 rewards, as people seem to like pledging at those levels. I somehow didn’t quite remember that as I started the campaign, and made up a finite number of $50 rewards, garnering some early criticism, and had to add more fast. (More on those prop-related rewards in a moment.) But yes, be sure you’ve got good premiums at those numbers, and make sure you have enough for a lot of people.
What else I learned from our campaign:
Having a super-complicated rewards structure (in our case a lot of unique one-off props from the show) was confusing and cluttered our Kickstarter page. I imagine that’s easier for others to avoid, so if you can, do. Although I do think our fans and friends enjoyed the props. It’d be nice if Kickstarter could hide one-off rewards which were pledged for. I may mention that to them. Aside from that the site was pretty much a joy to use.
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