Why You Can't Rely on Kickstarter to Get Funded

New Kickstarter Changes in Review

Kickstarter has now unveiled it's new changes to lower the project requirements for a campaign to launch on their platform. 

Their initial screening by a Kickstarter community manager helped Kickstarter avoid charity based projects or begging-based campaigns. This kept Kickstarter as a platform of new, original ideas that the crowdfunding community was interested in, and was the main difference to it's counter part Indiegogo, who also allows anyone to create a project with no initial screening.

New changes to Kickstarter in a nutshell

Bad News for Project Owners on Kickstarter

Now Kickstarter is going to see a surge in projects on their site, who would normally go to Indiegogo, but are now going to flock to the platform that everyone wanted to be on, but couldn't get on because of the screening process. Indiegogo has been an open source platform from the start, allowing everyone to start a project for any topic they wanted (which explains the low success rate of their campaigns). This is bad for the average Crowdfunder because now their project is going to get lost amongst all the others in the pages.

Your project, like a needle in a haystack

What Does This Mean Going Forward?

It means that making your campaign stick out to a targeted audience is going to be that much more important. You can no longer rely on the Kickstarter community to fund your project. You need to seek out new ways to target Crowdfund supporters and people interested in supporting your campaign off the Kickstarter platform, but not in a way that is just general promotion to generic media contacts across the web.

Targeting Specific Audiences

Kickstartmyads is a Facebook Ads agency that specializes in promoting crowdfunding campaigns by using targeted Facebook ads. They helped us target past crowdfunding supporters, Kickstarter community members, people who 'liked' our fan page and anyone who would be interested in our unique type of product. That combined with our own social media promotion to our friends and family got us the results, and funds that we needed!

Using Social Media

Facebook is a great way to get in front of crowdfund supporters who have already contributed to Kickstarter campaigns before. Using your Facebook fan page and your own social media networks is a great way to start off your campaign with some contributions from the start! But social media promotion only goes so far. 

Another great method along with social media promotion is using targeted ads on Facebook. You can actually get in front of more people who are interested in your Crowdfunding campaign. You can sort by age, gender and country on Facebook's Ads Manager but that only goes so far and does not allow you to target crowdfund supporters and people who would likely contribute to your campaign.

- Natural Time Team