I received this email 14 days after the success of my campaign and a few days after the funds were placed into my bank account. I wanted to share this with you for those interested in starting, in the middle of, or have just completed a Kickstarter campaign.
The email from Kickstarter campaign
Congratulations on your successfully funded Kickstarter project!As you dive into the next stage of your project, we’ve put together a few tips to help you along the way:
1. Stay connected with backers
Respond to comments, questions, and messages, and use project updates to keep backers in the loop. Your backers will love getting the inside scoop on your project’s latest developments.2. Send out reward surveys
Send out your surveys when you’re ready to collect all the info you need to deliver backers’ rewards. If you need an address, consider waiting till you’re ready to ship (people move!). If your rewards will be shipped at varying times, set up a calendar or make a checklist to keep things organized.3. Deliver rewards
Post an update when you’re ready to ship rewards. Include pictures of the packing party or share horror stories from the post office (backers love seeing photos and videos of their rewards being packaged).4. Get feedback
When packages start arriving, encourage backers to send photos of rewards out in the wild or post reviews and reactions to your completed work. Keep the conversation going and enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done!This is where the real work begins! While fulfilling a Kickstarter project can be a lot of hard work, you’ve got a dedicated audience of backers committed to being a part of your creative journey — how cool is that?
Love,
Kickstarter
We are currently in the midst of finishing our comic book, Madman of Magic. This means we we have not yet completed many of these tasked mentioned in the email, but we will go through and talk about our strategy for each one.
1. Stay connected with backers:
We have not received any comments, questions, and messages since completion of the Kickstarter campaign. We have been posting project updates.Our goal is to post an update every two weeks. In every post we try to pack in as many images as possible (usually comic book panels created that week).
2. Send out reward surveys:
We plan on emailing out the survey (asking backers for addresses) a week before sending out all the packages to backers. We want to wait so that the information isn’t sitting on our computers for a month and a half waiting to be used.
Also, people move. This happened to me with a project I backed. They got my address at the end of their campaign, two months later when they sent my package I had already moved into a new house which caused me to get everything late.
While I didn’t mind getting it late, it is something that can be avoided by getting the information when it is needed.
3. Deliver rewards:
This part I am not looking forward to. Creating the rewards is fun, but I had an online ebay business in college. That experience has taught me that sending out many packages in a short amount of time is easy in theory but problems come up during the process and can be stressful.
Having my wife here should help a lot but I am still not looking forward to it. The email’s suggestion of “including pictures of the packing party or share horror stories from the post office” in an update will be fun.
4. Get feedback:
This is my favorite part. I love getting feedback! Even negative feedback is good as long as it is honest.
I feel this is the secret to my success with the Madman of Magic comic book. I shared the comic book’s trailer with thousand of YouTube users asking for feedback and it came pouring in. All that feedback was read and taken into consideration when putting together the Kickstarter campaign.
I can’t wait to take in all the feedback from the finished comic book to put into the next one. Also, having all the photos of people with their rewards will be fun to share and hopefully help promote people to buy the comic book and merchandise through the website.
Your turn to share
I love learning about other Kickstarter projects and more importantly the people behind the projects. If you are working on a project, thinking about working on one, or have experience with Kickstarter I would love to hear about it. You can leave it in the comment section below.
