Bolognesus wrote:

As a side note, do we know for sure if we can up our pledge (to include more pledges) after the KS via pledge manager?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/513277403/alien-vs-predator-the-miniatures-game/comments?cursor=5254844#comment-5254843

Stampede 1 day ago

just got answer from Prodos to my questions:

I want both "Real Aliens" and "You want a piece of me", but can afford only one of these atm. Is it possible to pledge "You want a piece of me" now and add RA in post-KS by paying an additional £155?

If so, do i get all credits and bonuses from the 2nd pledge aswell, as if I would have paid all right now?

Answer:
Yes
Yes

 Bolognesus wrote:

 Forlorn wrote:
Putting everything down on paper I can really see the value. If I follow your advice and move from Chopper to 1XWe're in the Pipe and 2X Looking Good there boss, I end up getting 1 extra Berserker, 2 extra Royal Guard *270k freebie* and 6 extra Huggers. That's incredible! I can still get everything I want and use the freebie addon to soak up the Alien Warriors box sets at 15.00per. Brilliant!




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 bubber wrote:
Forlon - had to re-read this. Thought you were out too!

No sir! I am in!!!

Happy to help

As a side note, do we know for sure if we can up our pledge (to include more pledges) after the KS via pledge manager?

I think criticism at this point speaks to a strong sense of disappointment rather than ego stroking. As a general rule, there's no call to explain people's behavior in an insulting way if there is also a reasonable way to explain it. On the other hand, the rhetoric is a bit too hot ITT.

30

Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi, Previously studied what makes projects successful at Kickstarter.
Votes by Ernie Bornheimer, Jonathan Sundqvist, Marc C. Lange, Tommy Chheng, and 25 more.
I've recently been advising a friend's campaign on Kickstarter, so here is a summary of the advice I've given him about telling his story, choosing a good goal and rewards, developing a project video, and reaching out to press and on social media. Some of this will certainly be more obvious than the rest but I think the interesting bits are in the details.

First, help people understand your angle on the project: highlight why you're passionate about your project, what inspired it, what you hope backers and others will take away from the project, what personal experiences motivated it and why you chose to put the project on Kickstarter rather than pursuing more traditional funding routes for whatever you are doing. Also, tell people why you or your team are qualified to deliver the project. This could mean explaining why being a newbie to something helps you bring a valuable new perspective or describing how you've produced similar projects in the past and have working prototypes and agreements in place with printers/manufacturers. Finally, think about how you hope supporters will contribute to the project (sharing stories, giving input, telling their friends, reading updates every couple weeks, contributing artistically, and don't forget backing...). By setting expectations early on of your vision and the type of creative control you want to keep and share, you'll get the most out of the crowd of supporters you're going to build and reduce the burden of having to manage a crowd's expectations later on while you also work to deliver. This is key, as some of the most wildly successful project creators joke that having a massively successful project (with all the Q&A and interested parties that result) was the "worst" part of being successful. It will also help you focus conversations with others around how they can get involved rather than asking for donations.

Second, choose a goal that's realistic and invest time in brainstorming rewards that get your friends and friends of friends excited. Women creators tend to set substantially lower goals than men but their projects are also more likely to be successful. Make sure you ask friends and strangers for feedback on rewards before you launch your project then listen to it. Rewards around the $25, $75 and $50 points are especially popular, but each reward also needs to be a good value. Offering a reward at the $5 and/or $10 level helps people with a weak appreciation for what you're doing get involved and feel like stakeholders too. Projects with smaller goals (those under $1K-5K) have a several times higher rate of success, although Kickstarter has had its share of carefully planned projects that became blockbusters too. After gathering feedback, multiply out a conservative estimate of how much you expect to raise from each reward net of costs to make sure your goal is reasonable. Don't skip that reality check; it really helps to put things in perspective!

As you brainstorm rewards, choose ones that you won't feel too burdened to produce and distribute if you're successful. Think about creating experiences (an online chat, a wrap party, or drinks with the cast from a movie or dance performance) where you can have personal interactions with a largish number of people without a lot of additional work. Offer to name a character of a backer's choosing, write a dance to a song they choose, or something equally personal for large backings if that doesn't infringe on the creative control you want to retain. Enlist friends who believe in the project to help you contribute or disseminate rewards. Ask a friend who throws great parties to arrange one for some of your backers or ask an artist friend to contribute original, appealing artwork for postcards or posters rather than using an impersonal logo or faceshots of actors as giveaways. Structure your rewards list so that a backer doesn't suffer "analysis paralysis." It should be quickly obvious to someone what level they want to give at, or at worst a backer should consider backing at one level and be tempted by the next one up. On Kickstarter, backers can change or cancel their pledge and reward level anytime through the end of a project; however, they can only choose one reward tier. The only way around this currently is for a backer to create more than one Kickstarter account, which can be annoying. So structure reward levels so they include everything substantial that you are offering at lower reward levels rather than rewards that someone may want to mix and match. If you're thinking of offering swag like T-shirts and tote bags, this advice is especially relevant; while you don't have to offer a T-shirt, tote bag, sticker, *and* poster for the highest level rewards, make sure each tier is substantially more desirable for your audience than the one below it. And even better is if your rewards go beyond just swag with your logo on it.

Third, invest time in developing a concise project video. The video should show you as the creator and its content should focus on addressing the questions from the first paragraph above through show and tell. A lot of creative people are very camera shy, but it helps backers connect with the project to see you and your authentic style, even if it is clumsy and a bit shy. If you are really, really shy, consider appearing for ten seconds then contributing some voice over or photos of you that is project-relevant. Keep the video short, around two minutes, I would say. Remember that backers might also view/discover the video from the Kickstarter category/location pages where they won't have the benefit of seeing the rest of your project page. You'd be surprised how many successful projects' backings come from strangers or people halfway across the country or world from the creator. Since a lot of folks quickly browse through many videos on Kickstarter and many don't make it past the first minute, you really need to make a compelling case from the outset (first 10-20 seconds) and pace it to keep a viewer's interest. Kickstarter has a nifty creator stats panel that lets you track how many views there have been of your video and how many of these views made it all the way to the end. To get the most of these stats, you'll want to cut out any silence or pause at the end of your video; otherwise, if most viewers click "stop" a second before the video is over you won't realize how many actually finished it.

Fourth, invest time in building your social network on facebook and twitter to engage people who might support you for one reason or another ahead of launching your project, the further in advance the better. I remember hearing there was one seventy year-oldish creator who nervously created a facebook account for the first time to get the word out about his Kickstarter and it helped his success immensely. Remember that bit about projects by women creators having a greater likelihood of success? Well, turns out this may be because women are better networkers. They get a larger share of their backers and funding from their facebook and twitter networks than men do. So, spend some time thinking about ways to make your friends and contacts feel like stakeholders in the project, by giving them credit for their help and recognizing their efforts, so that they can explain why they believe in the projects as they reach out to their networks. Use the carrot not the stick; if your friends are sharing your project out of obligation or guilt, that's a bad sign that you haven't made a compelling case for why audiences should support you. At Kickstarter, we discussed anecdotally how it seems like an early indication of a project that is going to be successful is that not only do the creator's friends share it on facebook but their friends of friends share it too. So coming up with a compelling case for why someone who doesn't know you would get excited enough that they would reach out to their network is key, and iterating on feedback about that early on will help you refine your message. If you don't have that, you may not be ready to do a big Kickstarter project.

Likewise, be thoughtful about getting the word out to press, especially local press or bloggers whose audience might genuinely be interested in your project. If you are doing a really small project and believe you can raise enough funding through your immediate friends, then maybe you don't need to reach out to press at all. Otherwise, press will often want two weeks of lead time and a news story, which ideally might be your launch. Focus on on addressing the questions in the first paragraph above in an email or press release and explain any current news items that may relate to your project. Do not spam people or press though -- not only can it get your Kickstarter project cancelled (see Kickstarter's guidelines) but if you're having to guilt or pressure press/people to cover your story, that's a good sign that your project isn't as compelling to others as you hoped and that you may need to go back to the drawing board. By this I mean don't send unsolicited messages to people you don't know, unless it is press or bloggers who are in the business of covering stories like yours. When reaching out to press and bloggers, explain why you think they and their readership might take an interest in your story and make it clear that you've read their work; never reach out more than once unless you receive a specific request for more information.

other stuff...
Throughout your project, provide updates when there is something new and meaningful to post about and not more. A Q&A with you the creator or other substantial updates often result in visible jumps in projects' trajectories while empty updates cause your audience to lose interest. Set expectations about how often your backers should expect to hear from you. Post FAQs rather than feeling like you have to personally respond to each backer unless there is a compelling reason to do so. A lot of project creators reach out to the Kickstarter team with funny and sometimes scary requests to get listed as a featured project. It doesn't work, so my advice is don't do it. Also, don't stalk the Kickstarter staff. The Kickstarter team sees each and every project that comes through and they select for creative projects that appeal to the tastes they've developed; you won't influence it by sending cupcakes, cookies, or glitter and you are also likely to turn them off.

There's certainly much more to say about successfully completing and delivering on a project, including reaching out to others who have worked on a similar project (on or off Kickstarter) to make sure you anticipate and plan for obstacles and delays in advance. But I'll just end with this: remember that Kickstarter is a platform for creative projects, so some crowdfunding projects are a better fit for the site than others. If you have a business you are trying to kickstart, a large number of products you're looking for a platform to sell on, if you're guilting people or pulling on heartstrings to get your project funded, or just haven't yet put together a compelling case for backers, you might want to rethink your strategy before posting and investing a great deal of time into a project on the site.

 RiTides wrote:
Still doesn't address rules much, but answers most pledge questions at least.

 RiTides wrote:
As they're running everything past Fox before they're allowed to show it, maybe you should take up your case with them! Prodos certainly isn't making the calls on the final features of the models, it's Fox doing so.

Personally I really like the Queen concept so far, but I do hope to see a bit more detail added for the final version.