Have you ever tried to raise funds for a new project or idea via Kickstarter? 
Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform for creative projects that includes everything from new film, games, music, art, design and technology. Since launching on April 8, 2009, Kickstarter has helped more than 3 million people (and 35,000 creative projects) with over $500 million in pledges!
But there is a completely different side to Kickstarter that most people never get to see. Many people think creating a project is complicated, but Kickstarter has some really easy to use yet powerful tools they’ve just improved to help creatives along the way. So here is a quick tour of tools you can now use to create and manage projects:
1. Backer Report
The Backer Report is at the heart of the creator tools giving you a list of each project’s backers, their chosen rewards and other pertinent information. Today’s Kickstarter update adds greatly improved filtering and search functions that make it easier for project creators to organize and access information about their backers. They also added a “reward sent” checkbox to the report to make it easier for creators to keep track of which backer’s they’ve already taken care of.
2. Surveys
When a creator is ready to begin sending out rewards, they can use the Kickstarter survey tool to request any neccasary info from supports. Once backers have responded, all their information is automatically integrated into the Backer Report, along with other individual info. Here’s an example of the survey calendar:
3. Project Dashboard
The analytics behind each project has a central hub in the project dashboard, which displays real-time information about a project’s funding progress and statistics. The dashboard lets creators track where their pledges are coming from listing each referral source and number of pledges generated. There’s also a pie chart seen below, showing what percentage of backers came from internal Kickstarter sources or outside referrals.
The new Backer Report and tool features are available to all creators starting today. Also, stay tuned for a new project coming soon from DashBurst 🙂 So have you ever used Kickstarter yet to fund a project?
I’ve thought about using Kickstarter to launch special projects within our company, but have never done it. Not sure it’s an ideal fit.
Well it may be worth a shot to test the waters on a smaller project. What are your main concerns?
I think kick-starter is a fantastic concept – have never done it though as I am the most uncreative person I know and will never have a brainwave idea to put to market 🙂
Ha Sonia! I think Kickstarter is trying to make project creation easier with this though. Remember every project doesn’t need to be the next Van Gogh 🙂
Hi, Daniel Zeevi. I’ve funded about 20 projects on Kickstarter but have never created a project and had no idea about any of these tools. Thanks so much for sharing!
My pleasure Terri Nakamura , wow you’ve been busy backing a lot of new projects:)