Kickstarter announces “new vision” with new creator tools

Kickstarter has just announced a new suite of tools for creators, including the ability to order projects after a campaign ends. The changes were announced on a blog post entitled A New Vision for Kickstarter. 

To do this, we’ve zeroed in on one undeniable truth: It takes more than money to bring an idea to life. Creators need solid marketing to reach and grow your audience, a good grasp of fulfillment logistics, constant communication with your Backers, and dependable connections with distributors and manufacturers, among other things.

This truth – the reality of what it takes to bring a new idea into the world – is at the center of Kickstarter’s new strategic vision

To help Creators bring their ideas to life we need to meet their needs across their creative journey. We’re expanding our core crowdfunding service to include a suite of innovative tools and services that support Creators pre-campaign, mid-campaign and post-campaign. 

Among the new services:
• Late pledges will now be available to all creators directly on Kickstarter – a service many used Indiegogo and other services for. In testing, this allowed one creator to raise more then 35% of their original pledges post campaign.

•  Kickstarter has also launched an in-house marketing team- known as the Kickstarter Performance team – that will provide both pre-launch and ongoing marketing support – which has already helped creators raise more then $1 million in pledges, according to Kickstarter.

• They’ve also revamped their post campaign backers survey to allow more seamless fulfillment:

• Allows Backers to enter their addresses, select item preferences – like size and color – and respond to custom questions directly on the pledge details page.
• Collects comprehensive responses for all items a Backer has selected, including add-ons and multiple quantities.
• Simplifies survey setup for Creators, enabling them to configure their survey once for all Backers, with our tool dynamically presenting the relevant questions based on the contents of each pledge.
• Makes it easier for Backers to submit and update an accurate shipping address.

The blog post promisees other improvement coming later in the year, including improvements to the mobile app and more shipping tools for creators. (Notably, no mention of the blockchain in all of this.)

Kickstarter provided several screenshots of the new tools.

While this all looks useful, it’s also a measure that Kickstarter has a lot more competition as the top crowdfunding platform, Backerkit, Indiegogo, Zoop, Patreon and several other platforms have finding an audience.

*Editorial Note: a previous version of this post stated “Late pledges will not be available to all creators directly on Kickstarter.” We have corrected it to read, “Late pledges will now be available to all creators directly on Kickstarter”