Get featured by Kickstarter. How?

When you launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter you should definitely aim to get the ''Project We Love'' badge, which will tell everyone that your project is so cool that it has been selected and picked manually by the Kickstarter staff!

When you are launching a new project, gaining access into people's desktops is likely your first barrier as far as actually selling the product you want to create.

Kickstarter has its own staff of people that daily analyze hundreds of campaigns, no, they're not robots, they're real people and they get involved with emotions transmitted by your campaign, that's a fundamental thing to keep in mind, real people are watching, evaluating and rating your campaign page before contacting you with the happy news ''You just got selected for Projects We Love!''

But what is really the secret sauce to get selected by Kickstarter team?

There is actually no secret recipe or magic in the selection process, here you'll get just a bunch of practical steps you have to follow in order to get noticed and hopefully be selected.

Before reading the article...

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1. PRESENT A CLEAR IDEA OF YOUR PROJECT

Every Kickstarter project starts with a creative idea, BUT what the staff is looking for are standout projects to feature and unique ideas, for example, projects that involve new approaches to creating, ambitious ideas and amplify unreppresented communities.

Beyond having a unique idea, as I always tell you, the way you tell your story through your project page also plays a fundamental role, but especially when it's time to get picked by the team. There are a few extra steps you can take to build an eye-catching project page that will capture the attention of your backers and the Kickstarter team.

Having a clear and strong idea for your project is one of it, let people know what you're doing, give your project a title and description that lets people know what you’re making, but just remember to don’t overhype it, trust me you don't need to write in all caps this is the “BEST PROJECT EVER'', let backers write this!

2. STRAIGHT TO THE POINT IMAGES

Your project images is what people will see when they search for your project on Kickstarter or share it on social media.

It is fundamental that your images show your prototype or the real product, in this way people will trust it more and maybe become backers. Make it clear, bright, and simple, you don't need extra special effects, big texts and other distracting graphics. Rembember that less is more, and people are more attracted by what they can understand quickly. Just look at the example of my client's product Chupadoodles, simple and easy!

3. ESSENTIAL INFO COMES FIRST

When creating your campaign page always remember to be clear and straight to the point as we said earlier, most of all do it with crucial information. What are you creating? Why? These are the questions that people ask themselves when bumping into your campaign page on Kickstarter, so why don't you make them the first thing they'll see?

Make sure your project page starts with a quick, clear statement about what you’re doing. For sure you will want to describe your project in every tiny detail, you can still do that but further down the page, where you will also tell the story behind your project and more... So ask yourself if someone were skimming just the first two paragraphs, what information would you want them to see?

This description of my client's Astronic Watches says it all!

4. NOT JUST BLAH BLAH...

It might be easy to explain your project in 1000 and more words in order to get people to know your world and ideas, but that's not how it works, your campaign page should not be full of just ''blah blah'', you need clear visuals, images, videos, GIFs and more! Would you rather see the design and specs of a new pair of earphones for example, or rather read why they are great, cool and innovative?

Look for images and GIFs that would catch your eye if you would see them on social media, add anything that shows your creative process, show behind the scenes, hands-on work that goes into bringing your project to life is highly encouraged.

Look how simple and effective is my client Cleep Pro product presented on its campaign page (on Indiegogo)

5. SHOW YOUR REWARDS

It might be useful to show to people that visit your campaign what are the rewards that you will offer, that will create engagement and raise the hype to have your product directly at home! Make it nice and catchy, we talked about rewards in my last blog post, make sure to check it before creating your reward page.

If you have finished or near-finished examples of what you’re making or even previous, similar works add photos of them to your project page, because offering some concrete examples of what you hope to create (or have created in the past) will help motivate backers to get involved.

Look how my client Frescopod did on his campaign page showing all the rewards!

6. TALK TO EVERYONE

Kickstarter is a website open to every age, so always remember to keep your project image and text free from profanity and appropriate for people of all ages. For this reason, remember also that Kickstarter it's open to creators and backers around the world and a large proportion of its community is English-speaking so if you’re using other languages on your project page, it helps to include translations, for example you can add subtitles and captions to your video in order to make sure you’re communicating your project to the broadest possible audience.

As I always tell to my clients, it's better to have simple but efficient translation of your product so that anyone can undestand your project and decide to back you!

7. NO SPAM, PLEASE

What's worse than spamming? We all don't like spam in any case, especially when we want to promote our project to many people.

Don’t promote your project where it shouldn’t or send unsolicited messages to people you don’t know. Always keep in mind that whether you’re doing it via email or on social networks, it’s against Kickstarter’s Community Guidelines and could get you suspended from the platform.
There are thousands of projects live on Kickstarter at any given time, Kickstarter can’t feature them all. But if you follow the tips listed here, you’ll have the best possible chance of catching the eye of the Kickstarter team and a community of backers who will be passionate about helping you bring your project to life!

What's more important is to focus on the storytelling and tell people why your project is important and should be backed, there's no need for a campaing spam anywhere, just put your best emotions into it and people will believe you!

SOME EXAMPLES

Following these steps, two of my clients were featured by Kickstarter's Project We Love, they are Andrew from Go Away Covid! we talked with him during this testimonial interview where he also explains how did he manage to get picked by Kickstarter staff. The other one is Natasha from Chupadoodles a young artist that managed to fund her dream project, a kawaii agenda featuring her illustrations!

You can notice that on both campaigns the tips above have been followed and respected:

- Clear Images and Videos
- Straight to the point descriptions
- Simple Language for Everyone

You may see that these ideas are most likely to be featured from Kickstarter because they really respect their values and what they believe. I'm so happy to have helped them launch these two successful campaigns and that they managed to get featured by Kickstarter Staff, go check their campaigns there are a lot of things to learn!

WRAPPING IT UP

This is it for today, creators, getting featured by Kickstarter will increase the popularity of your campaign on Kickstarter it can help you create buzz around your campaign and incentive people into backing your campaign, so make sure to follow these tips really well and think about the target for your product, then you can always contact Kickstarter and pitch them your project, be honest and concise, they may reply to you sooner than you think if they like what they see!

A crowdfunding launch requires a lot of hard work and sacrifices, but I'm sure that it will be worth it in order to start making your dream project come true.

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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