The effort to launch via crowdfunding The Artifact 3e has failed. But that was not the only reason why I wanted to run the fund drive and in that I think I can grasp a smaller success. I wanted to know what it would take to run a successful campaign and then share that with you the reader.

To start talking about how to run a successful crowdfunding effort, lets talk about numbers that you can look at before you ever run a campaign. The idea is to give someone who is wondering “Could I get funded this way?” a reasonably accurate gauge to look at before jumping in. Some of this I learned from others and some of it, as you will see is my own data, the rest is impressions that I got. I’ll try and clearly delineate them so you can know how much value to assign to each.

How Many Backers?

You can figure out how much money you need to produce a book but what you need to worry about for crowdfunding is how many backers you can get. Let’s look at some raw numbers for the period of the Kickstarter.

109,231 hits to theartifact.net

676 referrals to theartifact.net

1653 page views according to word press

414 second edition downloads

214 third edition downloads

285 video plays 42 (15%) of plays completed

27 backers

Average pledge $40

What can be divined from this information? For one, this is roughly double what I normally get as far as traffic. I can’t say that would happen to anyone that runs a crowdfunding effort but the idea that this is a special event does seem to make a difference. At an average of $40 a backer I needed to get 125 backers. Now that average might have dropped because the big backers jumped in early and most of the backers at the end were between $10 and $40.

So the first thing you need to do is look at your regular traffic. Just looking at raw traffic, I would have needed 8,265 page views in the month of the kickstarter to draw in enough backers (or 5x the number I got). So if you already get that kind of traffic, you might be able to run a Kickstarter at the $5000 level.

Now interestingly, there were roughly the same number of third edition downloads as video plays, I’m not sure there’s a real correlation there but it’s interesting. Unfortunately Kickstarter doesn’t tell me how far into the video people watched. I don’t know if they started and immediately killed it or watched most of the way through. What we can tell is that 64% of those that watched the video all the way through backed the project. If that’s a real benchmark, in theory you could put the video on YouTube for a few weeks and get the viewer data and then try to gauge interest before ever having to set a funding goal.

It’s been mentioned in the past, that a good measure of how many backers you will have can be measured by your Facebook followers. I don’t have a Facebook account but from the projects I’ve looked at, it’s not a bad gauge. I’m not sure how Twitter followers or Google+ circles stack up but if you already have a link to people that follow you, especially if it’s specifically an account for the game, there’s a good chance they’ll back it.

What went wrong? What could have been done?

The first thing I probably did wrong is overshared. There’s a point where a person’s interest is piqued. Anything past that and all you’re doing is giving them something to not like. Going into the project, I knew my video was long but I wasn’t sure if that would be perceived as a good thing or a bad thing. The fact that only 15% of viewers watched the whole thing means it was just giving people something to object to. Most Kickstarter videos I’ve seen are a minute and a half, unless they’re something really really amazing to watch.

My second bit of oversharing is I should have kept the art I have already, out of the whole thing. People with a few graphic headers running across the page seem to do better than I did. So if you don’t have world class art, leave it out. Giving people more, is just giving them more to complain about.

If I did have any money, I could have paid some of the artist to do some work and then post that. That wasn’t an option for me and my situation. A few people asked why I didn’t already have the artwork already. That’s a bit silly since getting the artwork was the point of the whole thing. I stated it multiple times in multiple places and people still asked. Sometimes people are silly and miss obvious information, I’ve done it so I can’t really fault them. It’s just something to be aware of, state plainly what the reason for the Kickstarter is and repeat it over and over. Make it part of every announcement and post.

The same thing goes for the game. Why back if you can get it anyway? My hope was that by giving people a look at the game, they might get interested. Remember Technoir? It was going to be amazing, revolutionary. Now a lot of the backers are saying that they’re not really fond of the system. They can’t pull out now, it’s too late.

The moral here is, try and figure out at what point you’ve piqued the reader’s interest and then stop. I have a feeling that cognitive dissonance will encourage them to like the game at least a little even if they wouldn’t have as a free game.

The last thing that I might have done wrong is listen to Kickstarter as to the length of the campaign. Thirty days sounds like a good chunk of time but in the middle of the campaign, when things simmered down, There wasn’t enough time for me to turn the boat around. A lot of RPG Kickstarters are going for longer periods, 45 days, 60 days. I can’t say another fifteen days would have done the trick, but it could have helped. To temper that thought though, a campaign normally gets a chunk of funding early on (you want about 30%) and then the rest at the very end. If you don’t get up to 30% in the first week to week and a half, you’re not likely to succeed.

What went right?

I think Rob Lang and the free RPG blog went right for me, Rouge Games went right, Nils at Enderra went right and Fitz at Game Knight Reviews went right. The point is, before you start a Kickstarter, talk to blogs, get reviews, but have them wait until just after the launch to post the reviews. You don’t want the posts going up early because you don’t want a barrier to the blog reader going and pledging. A lot of times people intend to pledge but if they have to wait, they forget. Maybe they’ll remember later, maybe not.

Look at the number of followers the blog has, figure that about 10% will check out the Kickstarter. As close as I can figure it, that’s about what I got as far as eyeballs looking at the project. Selling them once there is another thing.

One thing that I played around with is to be controversial. I don’t have a stomach for raising a ruckus anymore so the bit I did cause left a bad taste in my mouth. I do have to admit that it was effective. Each time I made a provocative statement in a message board or on the blog here, I got a few backers. I don’t know if that’s an alpha male thing, but I tried it a few times and it happened each time. That’s a tough recommendation to make. Maybe it would be better to simply say to act like an alpha and you’ll get more people willing to follow.

It would seem that we’re not going to make the Kickstarter funding goal unless something miraculous happens. So what does that mean for The Artifact moving forward? For one, I will not be re-kicking this project. I will have to find new ways to get to the kind of product I would like to turn out. That means this will take more time. That’s disappointing but not the end of the world.

This has been an interesting ride. Some have been very enthusiastic about The Artifact and backed it accordingly. Others have been deriding, mocking even. That’s not surprising even bigger and very successful projects have had their share of mockery. It just means that the RPG community has a variety of values that differ greatly from person to person. Many who have no problem deriding others.

I’ve learned a bit about Kickstarter and what it takes to succeed in getting funded. The sad truth is, Kickstarter is mainly going to be useful only to established names in the RPG community. There are some ways around this. One is to get an RPG maven to trumpet a product. I have trouble with that. To me the problem with that is that a small group are elevated to the status of choosing what the rest of the community will see come to life. We might like and enjoy the input from the prominent names in our community but do you want them dictating all your RPG choices? I wouldn’t.

I had a small group of people say “Of course you’re not getting funding, look at ‘X’, that writer barely made their funding goal and he’s a big name.” That’s kind of a sad attitude to have. Think about it. If we relegated ourselves to only the products and writers already out there, we would be reduced to a stagnating hobby retreading the same old stories for years.

You build the hobby, your choices will either build in new voices or cement it in place to what already exists. If you’re afraid of the hobby being interesting, go ahead and cement away. If you want new and interesting choices, support the guys you’ve never heard of.

If you’re looking at the Kickstarter, we’ve just picked up a few more backers, so that’s great! We still need a lot more obviously. So can we make the goal? At first look you might say, look, you’ve just burned through 20 days and only got to 13%.

However! Keep in mind that our funding goal is not unreachable. Other projects have reached our funding goals in a day or two. It is not impossible, although I do admit our chances are dwindling. So what does that mean? It means that if you haven’t backed yet, we need you to head over to the Kickstarter and put in a pledge.

Why be a backer? Well, you’ll get a great feeling that you helped the artists pay their bills. That’s the main thrust for this Kickstarter. You’ll also be able to say you helped make an RPG a success and be able to prove it because your name will be on the back of the book. In addition you’ll get a new and shiny game, maybe a PDF, maybe a hardcopy book depending on you pledge level.

So the answer is. . . YES! Let’s make this happen!

The Kickstarter got off to a pretty good start, the backers that put in their pledges so far have been far more generous than I had expected. They’ve also done a lot of leg work to get the word out. I can’t find enough good things to say about the backers that have pledged.

But The Artifact still needs your help! If you haven’t backed, even small amounts will help. If you can pledge $10 or even $1, it will help out immensely.

The book text is in it’s beta now and is available to all backers no matter what amount you pledge.

I owe Rob Lang at the Free RPG Blog and Icar a lot for all the help he’s given me and The Artifact. He kicks my butt when I get lazy and sloppy. He’s also come out to give a ton of support to The Artifact’s Kickstarter. So thank you Dr. Lang for all your help and encouragement.

I got my line in the KS video “The Artifact is not a space opera” from Rob’s original review of the game.

Nils from Enderra also gave The Artifact a plug. Nils does some really cool (and huge) star maps and does a lot of world building. Take a look.

Rogue Games gave The Artifact a nice plug on their website. Why not go and check it out?

If you’d like to support a great game and help out a bunch of artists put food on their tables. . .

Please Support The Artifact Kickstarter!

We finally got the go ahead from Kickstarter and just launched. We have 30 days to raise the full amount of $5,000 dollars. After fees and unsuccessful cards that figure will probably be reduced to $4,500. Half of it will go to fulfilling the rewards and most of the other half will be going to the artists. If we raise more, it will go to getting professional editors and layout artists involved.

If you like what you see, even if you don’t like what you see, please spread the news to your friends!

I could get the go ahead at any time to start the Kickstarter but at the moment I don’t have any way of knowing when they’ll look at the project. I know I’ve been telling you guys this week was it but maybe it won’t be. Kickstarter used to have you do a write up that you submitted first. It would outline generally what you wanted to do and they would judge your project off that. Now they evaluate the project after it’s been completed and submitted. I can understand how that would be a more reliable system to make sure people were following the guidelines but it makes launch time unpredictable. The forms say it usually takes 1-2 days to approve a project, Kickstarter has been growing in popularity so maybe they’re overloaded right now.

In the future I’ll have to build this into my timeline.