by Helena Kaufman
Realistic Reach
Setting goals is a real test of your own confidence in your project, don’t you find?
You’ve taken your idea from your mind to the market. You’ve followed logical steps that include, but are not limited to:
- Dreaming and daring
- Planning and plotting an outline
- Gathering your resources, allocating time and energy
- Imagining how to communicate your passion and project
- Preparing a video and word picture to take public
You’ve done all this in various degrees of privacy and sharing. When you dare to set actual goals, you really find out how committed you are and how organized you are. Get this straight in your mind, and you’ll return to your video script and redraft your messages to really get that confidence across.
Goals are for you to see and meet, and your backers to sense and feel secure supporting!
All or Nothing – a Kickstarter Goal
Because Kickstarter operates on an all-or-nothing funding model, projects must be fully funded at the end of the fund raising period, or no money changes hands. Your requirements:
- Set a funding goal based on what you need to complete your project
- Pick a length of time to reach your cash goal considering that you will be reaching out to virtual strangers, friends, family and your current and developing networks
Decisions are made individually as each project has its own personality and life.
Budget Basics
Your next steps hinge on how much money you need. Are you going for full funding, or a partial amount? Naturally, it’s not just an inflow or revenue you count. Consider production costs of the videos, materials, plus the rewards and delivering them to backers.
Getting to Goal
Set your funding goal, once you’ve tallied up all your research and listed all your costs. You can raise more than your goal but never less due to Kickstarter’s model. If you are working outside of this model, you want to be as close in the ‘ball park’ figuring as possible as most business models don’t allow for the kind of testing available at Kickstarter and fail safe protection of contributor’s cash in case the project is not a ‘go’.
Set the goal or a mark you can meet, or you’ll have nothing.
Timing Is Everything
As critical in commerce and communication as it is in comedy, so is timing your project outreach.
Project deadlines can be set for a one to 60 day range. It may seem natural to go for a longer period of time but then you run the risk of backers procrastinating, or thinking they will return. You lose urgency and therefore momentum.
You also don’t want to lose steam, yourself. It takes energy and attention to run a campaign, or monitor a Kickstart fund raising project. Statistically, projects lasting 30 days or less have the highest success rate according to Kickstarter. This period of time seems to convey confidence in your project and goal.
Staying on Track, Personally and Professionally
Set goals at the top of the project, and review them as you become wiser from experience or new information.
If you know what you are aiming for then you can take advantage of opportunities to tell your story. Promoting your project in various channels of communication becomes easy and natural with goals. Your goal (re)setting will both inspire you to action and prevent you from overdoing some aspect that might detract from your ultimate achievement.
Next time, your promotion channels.
Be creative,
Be in touch,
Helena
Helena Kaufman is a writer and communications trainer. In 1982, success at promoting, marketing and writing about 200 artisans launched Helena as an event publicist. The designers who sold at the Annual Manitoba Christmas Craft Sale exhibited original functional and decorative pieces in fibre, pottery, metal, oil, paper, wood, distinctive wearable art and more. Helena worked to raise their profile, bring media attention and increase their sales. She now shares some of that savvy in the Artisan Ally series. Helena’s writing and communications site can be found here.
