A successful Kickstarter could be the difference between letting a dream fall to pieces or starting a multimillion dollar business. Last summer, Time magazine reported that Kickstarter creator Ryan Grepper raised $13,285,226 in 52 days to fund a project for a smart cooler with built-in speakers, a blender, USB ports and LED lights.
The Coolest Cooler is now considered the most successful Kickstarter campaign in the site's history — but even Grepper faced trouble after failing to hit his 2013 goal of $125,000 for the very same project.
How did Grepper fail to meet a goal just over $100,000, and then raise more than $2 million in just 24 hours? It's hard to be certain in a case like this, but Bentley University's Data Analytics Research Team (DART) may have discovered what separates the fundraising website's failures from the successes on a broader scale.
An ambitious group of graduate students in Bentley University's masters of business analytics program worked closely with guiding faculty researchers for this project in collaboration with DART. The team scraped, decoded and analyzed millions of lines of code using five different analytics software packages to find what criteria make a successful Kickstarter project with the highest chance of success.
The Secrets to Success
A typical Kickstarter campaign consists of dozens of components. Projects are categorized by type — be it crafts, dance, tech or many others — and creators strategize about the title and description to vie for attention. Creators set specific goals and offer rewards to the public based on the size of each contribution. There's a specific window of time to collect donations, and failing to meet the stated goal within the allotted time results in failure and $0 in funding. If the project is under the goal even by $1 at the end of the time frame, it is shut down without funding.
The team found that the most important variables were:
The Average Contribution and Overall Goal
The amount contributed by the average backer is the most critical to the project outcome. As the average amount donated per backer increases, the potential to reach a goal climbs, creating a strong incentive for creators to offer rewards for higher donations. The team found that ultimately, projects with a minimum donation cutoff of $25 tended to end in success. Instead of offering an incentive for $10 or $15 donations, organizers may find the most success by offering an incentive after a $25 donation or higher.
The overall goal (measured in dollars) is the second most important determinant of success. The higher the funding goal is, the less likely a project is expected to succeed. The odds of receiving funding runs just above 50 percent for a goal of $9,000 according to the team's analysis.
Name and Description
Even before the donations start to roll in, a project could be doomed to fail based solely on its title and description. These are two important variables creators need to control very carefully. According to the study, projects with the highest amount of success had catchy titles and pithy descriptions. DART suggests the optimal title of a project contains between 40 and 60 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Statistical support around description length revealed a sweet spot that creators may want to stick to. Descriptions should contain between 75 and 120 words for the greatest chance of success. This suggests that even the most well thought out and meticulously planned projects could fail compared to a campaign with a more concise pitch.
The type of venture you plan to fund also has a statistical level of success on Kickstarter. Creators starting a campaign to fund a dance production, theater performance, music project, comic or art venture enjoy a success rate over 50 percent. On the other hand, projects in tech, crafts and design run just a 39 percent chance of success or lower on average. DART recognized the success of these projects may likely be influenced by their goals. Campaigns for tech, craft and design ventures normally aim to raise far more — and thus a lower chance of success — compared to dance or theater performances that often require smaller sums of money to cover bare minimum production costs.
Category and Duration
Creators also have to decide an acceptable duration for their fundraising campaign. While some may think a longer time period may attract more donations over a greater period, the data suggested differently. Overall, the team found that projects with a duration of less than 30 days tended to succeed. DART attributed this to motivation in humans — projects with a shorter window of time pressure backers to donate sooner and encourage other backers to donate based on recent contributions. The project doesn't have time to go stale.
Campaigns funding dance productions, theater performances, music projects, comics or art ventures enjoy a success rate over 50 percent.
Other Criteria
There are still many other variables that factor into success on Kickstarter. From geographic location to month that the project is launched, there's data that shows a clear and measurable impact between criteria and Kickstarter success. DART noted that New England is the region with the highest success rate in Kickstarter projects — a 54 percent success rate. Leading states include Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. DART's findings also conclude that the most successful months to fund a project occurred in the winter. Creators face greater competition in the summer due to a higher amount of launched Kickstarter campaigns.
For a detailed description of the research methodology and findings, check out "Shh...We Scraped Kickstarter's Data."