15 Updates Ideas and Tips for Kickstarter and Indiegogo

You all know that already: a successful crowdfunding campaign page always features a great project description, an outreach plan, and an established community of backers.

The same importance is held to the updates to send to your backers. What's cool about it is that project updates aren't just displayed on the project page, they’re also delivered directly to backers’ inboxes so it can be a powerful tool for engaging backers and motivating them to share your project.

Your main priority should be donors and future supporters, they should constantly know what the status of your crowdfunding is or how you’re coming along with your goals.

However, sometimes creators lose focus on updates and don't actually exploit them, so it can be difficult to figure out when to post your updates and what to write.

In this article, I'll show you some tips about the creation of the updates on Kickstarter and Indiegogo and share some ideas to write your updates about.

Before reading the article...

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1. HOW TO SEND UPDATES

The update will be posted on your campaign on a specific tab on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. When you publish the updates they will automatically be sent as an email too. The same process of publishing will almost be the same both for Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

On Kickstarter, you click on ''create new update'' and then you have the option of sending out an update to everyone or to backers only. If you send it out to everyone, people can scroll and browse around your updates tab, reading what you’ve been writing to your audience, and then decide to back or not.

You may want to create an update only for backers to give them special communications regarding their orders etc. While some other updates like reaching the goal, new tiers open, etc... could be for everyone. What you can do either is send updates just to some specific backers for example you might want to send an update to those who paid the $99 tier, but not the $59 tier.

On Indiegogo, updates work the same, you can send backers automatic emails and publish them on the campaign page, the only thing is that Indiegogo doesn't allow backers segmentation.

With both Kickstarter and Indiegogo updates, you can preview the update before you actually send it out, and with Indiegogo, you can also send an email preview of the update rather than just on the dashboard.

2. WHY SENDING UPDATES?

Updates are fundamental to involve your community and make people who already backed feel important and updated about how's the project going.

Remember that publishing an update for every little thing is not a good strategy (post them to your social media instead!) also because your backers will receive emails regarding it, you don't want to send an email a day. Stick to important and catchy information to make people back.

There are other reasons to send updates:

- Show up to Kickstarter and Indiegogo Algorithm
With updates people get sent back to your page, this is important to keep you on top of the platform algorithm since Kickstarter and Indiegogo take into consideration the amount of traffic to the page in order to see the project's popularity, that's why you have to keep sending people even if they're already backers, to your page.

- Engage with your community
It's very important to keep your backers engaged, because as you may know these people have the opportunity to refund your project at any time between 30-60 days and we don't want that! That's why you need to use the updates in order to show your competency as a founder, how committed you're to your project, and create trust within your backers

- Keep people in the loop of your project
Campaign Updates is where you can talk about future plans and get entice your backers to continue supporting your project. This could be for example referrals to friends or supporting the project by upgrading to a different pledge or adding more to their order.

Updates are a precious tool that you shouldn't overlook in order to achieve a successful campaign.

And if you don't know what to post about, just scroll down and read these amazing project update ideas!

3. AMAZING UPDATE IDEAS

Sometimes it's not easy to come up with original and useful ideas for your updates, remember that your backers and followers will get an email for it and should get important info from it.

Let's see some original and catchy ideas for your Kickstarter and Indiegogo updates:

• Point out your campaign milestones
• If you get chosen by Kickstarter's Project We Love, let everyone know!
• Introduce your amazing team
• Link to all the press, interviews, and blogs articles talking about your project
• Reply to all the questions you get on the comments and messages
• Talk about the projects you like (cross-promotion)
• Post tons of pictures about your product and proof that it exists
• Share any big achievement, like if you receive a large pledge or a deal with manufacturer, or distributor.
• Talk about the challenges that come up, like changes to the cost of supplies etc.
• Of course, celebrate when you reach your goal or when the rewards are shipped!
• Post on your campaign’s one-year anniversary (Kickstarter sends you an email on that day)
• Post live updates while you’re with your manufacturer, shipping the rewards etc.
• Remind backers to complete their surveys
• Let them know about any updates on shipping
• Be sincere about production problems or delays
• Last but not least, say thank you to your backers!

WRAPPING IT UP

Now you know how much campaign updates are important, doesn't matter if you're launching on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, with updates you have the possibility to make new people back your campaign and entice backers in doing a larger pledge.

Make sure to make these update ideas yours and make it work!

Just remember how much important is the community creation and pre-launch only in this way you'll get to meet your goal.

Always remember that before launching your project you will need to analyze and prepare your pre-launch phase to launch your first product, I’ve got you covered with my crowdfunding pre-launch free e-book called ''3 steps to success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo''. 

As always make sure to subscribe to my channel to stay updated on fresh new content that I’m gonna drop there.

Ciao ciao! 

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