The Kickstarter Diaries 7: Another Reward, Another Chance for Catastrophic Miscalculation
Episode seven in my behind-the-scenes account of running a crowdfunding campaign.
We’re starting the second week of the campaign, and as usual the initial surge of interest has waned and the gnawing sense of desperation is growing.
The seasoned Kickstarter campaigner has several strategies to call on in this situation.
The P.G. Wodehouse strategy: write to a wealthy aged relative and ask them to back him.
The Bonnie and Clyde strategy: hold up a convenience store and force the owner at gunpoint to back him.
The New Reward strategy: come up with a new incentive that will attract backers out of the woods in droves.
By and large I have traditionally favored this approach over the other two, but it comes with its own, potentially disastrous risks.
In a sense, I was lucky: in my very first Kickstarter campaign I made so many mistakes, and they were so costly in terms of time, effort, and money, that I realized a truth about crowdfunding, a mathematical theorem that nicely continues yesterday’s musings on fundraising and theoretical physics, namely….
The cost of fundraising may be greater than the funds raised.
Or, more professionally,
$out>$in
What did I do wrong that first time? Let me count the ways.
One of the rewards was a nice Endangered Alphabets mug.
Mugs are awful to ship. You need a special (costly) fold-up cardboard box, you need bubble-wrap, and you need a lot of luck if the mugs are not to arrive detached from their handles.
“I shouldn’t do this, but you need to know it,” said the post office clerk with whom I became friendly during the shipping marathon. She took my box and tossed it over the counter behind her into the bag of outgoing parcels. “Assume that someone, somewhere along the way, is going to do that, and pack accordingly.”
Another reward was my book Endangered Alphabets (no longer in print).
Here my mistake was to set the reward level too low. Literally hundreds of people pledged for it, which I thought was great until I actually had to ship them. My already-thin income margin vanished into time cost as I signed, packed and hand-addressed each one individually, then drove them to three different post offices around Burlington, because at the time the USPS wouldn’t take more than ten pieces of media mail at a time. Time, petrol, wear and tear on the car….
My biggest miscalculation, though, was in Alphabets merch. At the time I was using Society6.com, which would take my designs and put them on a wide variety of merch. They did a good job, and the products looked nice, and of course highly unusual, a good quality in merch. What I hadn’t taken into account was that I would have to pay postage twice, once from S6 to me, once from me to my kind backer. And the production process wasn’t cheap, so in the end almost all of the pledge vanished in fulfillment costs.
This brings us more or less up to date, because here I am trying to revive this snail of a campaign, and in thinking of new rewards to offer I came up with the idea of doing more carvings for my backers, only to come up against a totally unexpected obstacle, namely….
THERE IS NO WOOD IN ENGLAND
The primeval forests, which still cover the United States to such an extent that you can drive through the state of Maine for ten hours and see nothing but trees, have been stripped from Europe for so long that when I went into a DIY shop to buy boards for bookshelving, they sold not softwood planks but some kind of glue-and-sawdust composite pressed into plank form. If I offer a new carving as a reward, it will cost me literally twice as much as it would have a year ago.
So the last word, dear friends and potential backers is yours: what kind of new reward would you like me to offer? What unusual, nay unique, item would have you reaching for the Pledge button? Let me know, and if it doesn’t fall into any of the above traps, I’ll give it my best consideration. Reply to this post with your suggestions.
You can back my campaign at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/bringing-it-back-home.
Thanks!
