What Went Wrong With Our Kickstarter

By: burgundy bug

• 

Thank you for supporting The Burgundy Zine Merch Store campaign on Kickstarter

Source: The Burgundy Zine

CHOO-choo-ooo-oo-o…oo.oo. Well, bug buddies, it looks like our hype train has pulled aside for a pitstop. We’ve decided to conclude The Burgundy Zine Merch Store Kickstarter campaign early.

We can’t thank you enough for being all-aboard over the last few weeks. Generosity, love, and support are so unbelievably abundant throughout our community. We’re absolutely blown away by how far we’ve come since the launch of our Kickstarter.

Those who have graciously pledged their support to The Burgundy Zine Merch Store Campaign will not be charged for their contribution. We will not receive any of the pledges from our Kickstarter campaign, either.

Why? Kickstarter does not charge backers unless the campaign reaches its goal by the campaign deadline. If you’re still interested in supporting our community, we ask that you consider donating to The Burgundy Zine directly instead.

With all of that being said, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on our Kickstarter campaign, “what went wrong,” and what our plans are moving forward.

First, Let’s Look at the Kickstarter Statistics

62.56 percent of all Kickstarter projects “fail.”

Percentage of successfully funded Kickstarter projects as of December 2019 | Statista

According to Statista, only 37.44 percent of Kickstarter projects were “successful” in 2019.

Why Do Most Kickstarters Fail?

When you take a closer look at some of the top-reasons why Kickstarter projects are unsuccessful, it truly boils down to marketing.

You can blast your Kickstarter campaign all across social media until the cows come home. But unless you have a large social media following or a really broad appeal to your project, it won’t branch out very far.

A substantial marketing budget is crucial to a successful Kickstarter campaign, especially if you have less than a few thousand social media followers.

It sounds kind of disheartening – almost “pay to win,” if you will. You might wonder, “How am I expected to pay for marketing when I’m trying to raise funds because I clearly need a budget-boost in the first place?”

That’s the power of marketing. PR makes the world go round – and no, I’m not just saying that as someone who’s worked in PR, social media marketing, and sales before.

Love it or hate it, marketing is a tough but essential job. You get what you’re willing to pay for. And if you’re not willing to pay, you’re left at the mercy of your DIY-marketing-strategy.

What Went Wrong With Our Kickstarter Campaign

Inadequate Marketing On Our End

Let’s start at the beginning of our marketing timeline:

• We floated the idea of a Kickstarter campaign online a few months prior to launch and received great feedback.
• We began spreading the word among friends and family three months prior to the launch.
• We began compiling artwork and doing practice-portraits two months before the launch.
• We announced our Kickstarter campaign about a month before its launch and posted about it almost-daily leading up to the launch.
• We spent weeks designing and promoting over 100 new stickers exclusively for our Kickstarter campaign.
• We sent out an e-blast to every person who has ever been featured in The Burgundy Zine two weeks prior to the launch.
• We posted stories all night long, counting down the hours until the launch.
• We sent out another contributor-exclusive e-blast as soon as the Kickstarter campaign launched.

And then suddenly, we cut back on our Kickstarter marketing. Significantly.

This leads us to our next point.

Bad Timing

Asking your friends, family, and followers for money is already somewhat awkward and uncomfortable as it is. Now couple that with a global pandemic.

Nevertheless, based on the feedback we had received, we still decided to push through with the campaign.

And then tragedy struck. Shameless police brutality took yet another life, but now the whole world was tuned in and fighting back against systemic racism.

At that point, we wanted to end our Kickstarter campaign because we’d rather see our community supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Yes, having a merch store would be wonderful for our community! But social reform is far more important and it’s long overdue. Long, long overdue.

We were very torn between stopping the Kickstarter campaign just a few days after its launch and not wanting to let our community down. There had already been quite a few generous pledges to our campaign at that point and a lot of support from our loved ones, too.

So we still moved forward with the campaign but turned down our volume to help propel the voices that need to be heard most right now. It’s imperative that our community take part in supporting more important matters with us.

We did mix in some Instagram stories and Tweets about our Kickstarter here and there, but it certainly wasn’t at the volume we were initially blasting our campaign at.

It didn’t feel ethical to promote our own fundraising efforts during this time period. Our heart was still in our project, but we wanted to quiet down as much as possible without hurting the campaign too much.

To this day, we don’t regret our decision. Additionally, we will continue sharing information about the Black Lives Matter movement on our social media and encourage you to help us spread the word in our digital magazine.

We want to be as proactive as possible. We want to share your story. For more information about submitting content to our blog and digital magazine, click here.

We Relied Too Heavily On a Very Specific Niché

The Burgundy Zine community was our target demographic. This includes readers, contributors, and interviewees alike.

When we ran the numbers, there was the potential to raise at least $3,000 within our own community.

Granted, we didn’t expect every single contributor to donate, but if they had donated $10 each, we would’ve raised about $3,000. That’s not even including potential backers from our website traffic.

We weren’t chasing and shaking down our contributors. We did send out two emails letting them know about our campaign and we did mention the campaign while sharing The Burgundy Zine #15 link, but it wasn’t mandatory to donate in order to be part of our publication.

That being said, our community was at the center of our branding. We focused mainly on appealing to the audience we already had.

Our Kickstarter campaign does explain what The Burgundy Zine is and why we were aiming to launch a merch store, but try to look at it from an outside perspective.

If you had never heard of The Burgundy Zine, would you have donated? Exactly.

We should’ve implemented a broader appeal – better graphics, less targeted language, and so forth.

We Chose the Wrong Platform

Since we had a very community-oriented marketing strategy, we should’ve held our merch store campaign on a different crowdsourcing platform.

Kickstarter is a wonderful crowdsourcing hub for start-up companies, indie game developers, engineers, and artists. However, their projects have broad appeal. They’re not just relying on an existing following – they’re gaining support from the followers of their followers, news media outlets, and other people who’d probably never heard of them before.

In our case, it would’ve made more sense to run the campaign on a platform like Go Fund Me or Fundly. These crowdsourcing sites allow you to keep the donations received regardless of whether you reach your goal.

Looking back, we should’ve opted for a platform like Donor Box from the start, which simply allows individuals to donate to you with no strings attached.

Donor Box makes a lot more sense for our merch store campaign and for The Burgundy Zine as a whole. Individuals have asked us before if they can support our community through a direct donation, and this gives them the opportunity to do so.

Quite a few of these individuals happily supported our Kickstarter campaign, but others were a bit more hesitant. They wanted to donate to us directly and ensure we received their donation.

So why did we choose Kickstarter? We liked the idea of revolving our campaign around backer rewards!

It’s a lot less unnerving to ask for donations when you’re promising something like artwork in return for the backer’s pledge.

Yet, the majority of our backers told us they were really just supporting our campaign to support us. Yeah, the art rewards were cool, but it wasn’t the driving force that motivated them to pledge their support.

They were simply backing our campaign out of the kindness of their hearts. Which makes us teary eyed to even think about, especially during this unprecedented time period.

We Had No Marketing Budget

Last – but most certainly not least – we had no marketing budget. We didn’t have the means to pay for press release distribution or for a company to spam our Kickstarter link across a bunch of bot social media accounts.

Well, I take that back just a little bit. We were solicited by at least a dozen or two Kickstarter marketing companies following our campaign launch. Throwing caution to the wind, we took a chance with one of them with a very minimal budget.

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty details of how it panned out, but let’s just say all 12 pledges we received were from people we knew within The Burgundy Zine community.

Going Forward

This is just a pit stop for The Burgundy Zine Merch Store hype train. We will reach our final destination. It’ll take a little longer to reach that last stop, but it’ll be worth it.

We will continue sharing updates about The Burgundy Zine Merch Store as we have new information to share (rather than on a weekly basis).

Initially, we intended on launching The Burgundy Zine Merch Store by the end of this year. The launch will be delayed due to funding. We do not have a new launch date in mind yet, but we will keep you in the loop!

Those who have submitted artwork or pitched ideas to our upcoming merch store will still have the opportunity to partner with us. It just might take a little longer than we anticipated.

In Conclusion

We can’t thank you enough for your pledges, support, and morale throughout the entirety of our Kickstarter campaign. We feel so lucky and so grateful every day for the community that we have.

Although our Kickstarter campaign didn’t meet its goal, we’re still blown away that our community raised $681! That’s incredible! We’re so touched and so honored that you believe in us.

Once again, those who backed the Kickstarter campaign will not be charged for their pledge. We will not be receiving any of the funds raised through Kickstarter.

If you are still interested in supporting The Burgundy Zine Merch Store, you may donate to us directly here. Your support means the world to us and more.

Donate to The Burgundy Zine

However, we still encourage you to consider donating to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, your local bail fund, or a number of other organizations before donating to our platform.

Additionally, you can learn more about how to support the Black Lives Matter movement here.

Thank you for your support, patience, and understanding. This has been an invaluable learning experience for us and we’re eager to embark on the next part of our journey together.

If you have any questions about our Kickstarter campaign, donating to The Burgundy Zine, or anything else, please contact us.

With love,
burgundy bug >:^)

---

Donate to The Burgundy Zine

Interested in having content featured in an upcoming blog post or issue of The Burgundy Zine? Head on over to the submissions page!

For all other inquiries, please fulfill a contact form.