Changelog is our regular update that highlights recent additions to the BackerKit backer management system.

Activity Feed

We’ve added an Activity Feed to the dashboard to give admins an easy to see log of what’s going on in the project. Actions such as importing backers, locking down backers, charging backer credit cards, marking orders as ready to ship, and creating backer segments will all appear in the Activity Feed. 

New Data Export Reports

Our exports section has two new reports: “Tracking Numbers” and “Freeform Question Responses”. The Tracking Numbers report will give you a list of all shipped backers with tracking numbers. The Freeform Question Responses report will give you all backers along with their freeform text responses to survey and add-on item questions.    

We’ve also significantly increased export report generation speed and added an email notification when reports are ready for download.

Analytics

Project admins can now add Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel tracking IDs to track pre-order store traffic.

Backer Email Log

We’ve added an “Emails” tab to the backer profile page where admins can see what emails have been sent to the backer through the BackerKit system. The section will log survey emails, survey response confirmations, survey reminders, and alert emails such as failed payment notifications. Note that only emails sent after 3/29/2017 will be logged.

Power Search

We’ve upgraded the in-project search tool. Use it to instantly find backers, SKUs,  pledge levels while you type. Read more about it in our Power Search Release Update.

Recently Visited

The dashboard has a new “Recently Visited” navigation box that provides quick links to project sections and backer profile pages that you’re recently viewed.

Dashboard Graphs

We’re testing out new display graphs for funds raised, surveys answered, and backer support inquiries per day on the project dashboard.

Crowdfunding Guides

We’ve launched our new crowdfunding guides page along with our first guide: The Practical Guide to Running a Crowdfunding Campaign!

We’ve made BackerKit’s search tool more dynamic and easier to use. Power Search is a system-wide search tool that allows project creators to have all the information they need at their fingertips. You can use it to find backers, look up specific SKUs or  pledge levels, navigate the app, and much more.

Previously, BackerKit’s search function could only search for backers by name. The new Power Search feature makes the search function much more powerful, and allows project creators to retrieve information easily without having to browse through the application.

We know that managing data can be challenging. A dynamic, responsive search tool makes this process more efficient, providing you with instantaneous results and saving you the time of clicking through menu options.

It’s simple and intuitive to use. The BackerKit app autocompletes the search field with suggestions, so you don’t even have to finish typing to find a specific item or settings page.

Happy searching!

Changelog is our regular update that highlights recent additions to the BackerKit backer management system.

Partial Fulfillment

Project creators can now use BackerKit to split individual backer rewards into multiple shipments and easily keep track of backers with orders that are partially fulfilled.

While we recommend that creators ship out rewards in a single package to save on shipping costs, we understand that some creators end up in situations where some reward items become available months before other reward items are ready to ship and they don’t want to make backers wait. Our partial fulfillment features make this split-shipment task easy to manage.

Please contact your customer success manager if you’d like to enable this feature for your project.

PayPal Payments

We’ve had PayPal payment support since last year, but now it’s officially built into the application. Backers can now pay for survey add-on items and pre-orders with PayPal in addition to paying via credit card through Stripe. PayPal payment support is available for Professional and Enterprise plans.

New BackerKit Blog: All or Nothing

We have a new blog! You’re looking at it right now. We’re in a unique position here at BackerKit where we have the opportunity to work with hundreds of successful crowdfunding creators every single month and All or Nothing is our way of giving back to the creator community.

Planning, running, and fulfilling a crowdfunding campaign is hard work. This new blog is a place for us to share tips, tactics, and strategies from successful crowding creators all over the world.

Help Desk Integration

Project creators can now connect their BackerKit projects to their Zendesk, Help Scout, or Desk.com help desk software to automatically pull in backer data and backer management links from BackerKit to enrich support ticket information.

Please contact your customer success manager if you’d like to enable this feature for your project.

Quick Start Guide Improvements

The Quick Start Guide walks creators through every step of the BackerKit set-up process between signing up and hitting ‘send’ on surveys. We’ve added more preview survey links and reorganized the guide to make it easier to enter required information and find important sections in the application.

Everyone loves checkmarks, but sometimes people mark steps as finished without completing them. We’ve changed the pre-orders and support steps to automatically mark as checked once all required fields are completed.

Raised in BackerKit

We’ve improved the ‘Raised in BackerKit’ report on the project dashboard with more detailed information. 

The report now shows the total amount of add-on sales and pre-orders, the amount that has yet to be charged, the failed payments total, and the amount successfully charged.

D.R.E.A.M. Data Rules Everything Around Me

Exports now show a completion percentage once you start running a data export request from your project page. We’ve also redesigned the data exports page to make the more popular export reports easier to find.

BackerKit customers can now connect their BackerKit projects to their Zendesk, Help Scout, or Desk.com help desk software to automatically pull in backer data and backer management links from BackerKit to enrich support ticket information.

Project creators use help desk software to manage the inflow of backer support tickets and allow teams to work together effectively. With this BackerKit integration, support tickets will now match the sender’s email address to automatically display relevant backer information and quick links to the backer’s profile page and other useful tools such as personal survey links to make it easier for teams to respond to backer inquiries.

Customizing help desk software is key to optimizing workflows and we’ve found that these data points and links are the most useful through our own experience in providing front-line backer support for thousands of crowdfunding projects.

If you are an existing BackerKit customer and would like to enable help desk integration for your existing Zendesk, Help Scout, or Desk.com installation please contact your success manager and we’ll get you set up!

TL; DR Today we released two products that will help crowdfunding project creators gain more exposure, prepare for managing their success, and perform research for future projects. We built a new crowdfunding projection model with help from our friends at Insight Data Science and a new trending page to help backers with project discovery. Check out BackerTracker here.

From Surveys to Shipped

Our mission at BackerKit is to help crowdfunded creators with the parts of the campaign fulfillment process that aren’t related to actually MAKING the thing people gave them money for. BackerKit helps creators do more of the things that they (and their backers) love like making mini museums and less of the tedious stuff like manually sending out tracking numbers.

BackerKit started largely out of the difficulties we experienced while fulfilling our very own record-setting crowdfunding campaign back in 2010. We realized then that getting funded was the easy part compared to the pain of fulfillment. Since we started in 2013, we’ve helped over 1,500 projects get through fulfillment and deliver something that their backers love.

One of the biggest challenges of working with creators is getting them to understand how complicated the post-campaign fulfillment process actually is. The #1 mistake we see creators make is underestimating the post-campaign challenge. That context switch from “Woohoo! I just raised a bunch of funding!” to “Oh man, I need to ship all this stuff!” doesn’t happen fast enough and failing to start on fulfillment early results in missed deadlines.

BackerTracker Projection Algorithm

That is why we created BackerTracker. We wanted to give creators a way to estimate their final funding amount raised sooner so that they can start thinking about how they can ramp up production and fulfillment even earlier.

We worked with Praveen Chowdary from Insight Data Science to help us build a crowdfunding prediction model. What’s cool is that the model uses the historical performance of past campaigns to predict the performance of a new campaign. Praveen explains that, “for any given campaign that is in progress, we find the past campaigns with a similar trend of funds using the nearest neighbor approach. The projected funding curve of the ongoing campaign is then estimated as a weighted average of these past campaigns.”

Each graph is the result of searching through thousands of past crowdfunding projects, finding the campaigns that have the most similar funding curve, and then averaging those campaigns to create a funding projection.

The projection adapts as we get more days of funding information which means that you’ll see an updated projection if a project gets a sudden influx of backers from a press mention or a new Facebook marketing campaign. In a way, it can help creators get early feedback on whether or not the activities they try out today will have an effect on their final funding amount.

Eva St. Clair, co-founder of Princess Awesome, explains that having projections “can change how the creators approach the media, their backers, and the scope of their project. It can help inform decisions such as what kind of stretch goals to set and how to achieve them, invaluable information that has the potential to push a project well past its original funding goal.”

Trending Projects

And we didn’t stop there. We are also releasing our BackerTracker trending page for project discovery. The trending page is not only a great way for crowdfunding fans to see what is new and cool across Indiegogo and Kickstarter (think of it as a front page for everything crowdfunding), but is also a great place for creators to start researching high-performing projects and study what they’re doing right.

We can’t wait to see how BackerTracker helps creators. If you have any feedback or great ideas, please let us know!

BackerTracker Beta Launch

Earlier today we launched BackerTracker, our crowdfunding project discovery tool.

Creators and backers can visit the BackerTracker site to discover the fastest growing crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo in all reward-focused categories including technology, games, design, publishing, art, fashion, food, music, film, comics, crafts, and journalism.

The trending projects list shows our ranked list of the top 25 crowdfunding projects and visitors can drill down to see trending projects by category.

Funding Projections

Each project page includes projection data that predicts the funding amount that each project will raise in the future. We built our funding prediction model using an algorithm that finds the campaigns in the past that best match the current project and uses that data to generate our funding prediction.

It takes about five days for a new project to settle down into a reliable funding prediction amount because the model needs several days of data to narrow down the project’s closest historical matches. Our model will improve as we gather more campaign performance data each day to add to our dataset. You can use our BackerKit Chrome Extension to display our projection graph on any Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign page.

We developed the funding prediction algorithm first to help campaign creators accurately predict how much their campaign will raise to help them get a head-start on fulfillment planning. When we talked with our customers about their general needs, many told us that they were more concerned with generating enough pledges to meet their funding goals. That’s why we decided to create a crowdfunding campaign discovery tool.

Please give the BackerTracker a try and let us know what you think.

If you’re a creator with a live campaign, use our Chrome Extension or find your project on BackerTracker to watch your campaign march towards success!

Segments and You

Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding project creators often decide to use BackerKit for our surveys, add-ons system and pledge manager platform, but creators often tell us that their favorite BackerKit feature is our segments tool because it saves them so much time during the fulfillment process.

Creators can use the tool filter backers by specific criteria to generate a segment of backers that they can then act upon with a variety of actions. Let’s say that you need to create an order export list of all backers located in Europe for your European fulfillment house.

You can use segments to create a list of all backers with shipping addresses in the Europe Region and then export the file for your fulfillment center. You can perform this task in less than a minute using BackerKit segments and exports.

You can use multiple filters to generate a segment and we even have segment meta-filters that let you combine or subtract segments. Let’s say that you want ship orders to Switzerland yourself instead of sending those orders to the fulfillment house. You can create a segment of Swiss backers for your DIY shipping and then create a another segment of European backers without Swiss backers for your fulfillment house.

We’ve updated our backer segmentation filters to give creators even more ways to filter backers just in time for the holiday shipping season.  Visit our Backer Manager page or our segment filters help document to see a massive list of all 34 segment filters.

The list includes four completely new filters:

Backers not receiving any SKUs that are set to ship.

This filter will let you find all of the backers that are currently not set to receive any items.

Backers with funds added in BackerKit is more than or equal to ____.

This filter will find all backers that have added funds within BackerKit equal to or over the specified amount.

Backers charged in BackerKit.

These are backers that had their credit cards charged successfully in BackerKit.

Backers with pending charges in BackerKit.

These are backers that have submitted payment information but have not been charged yet in BackerKit.

Thank you to all of the project creators that came to us with complicated problems that prompted the creation of these new filters!

New creators, contact us if you want to know more about how segments can help save time while fulfilling your crowdfunding project or sign up now to get started.

Holiday Update

BackerKit offices will be closed for the holidays from December 24, 2015 through January 3, 2016. If you have an emergency, our staff will try to respond to you as soon as possible, otherwise we’ll get back you when we return on January 4, 2016.

We’ve added image gallery support for items. Creators can now upload multiple images for each add-on and pre-order item to give backers more views of individual items.

Creators can now show an item from multiple angles or display all variations of an item to make it easier for backers to make their selections.

We’ve also introduced a new image repository to make it easier to upload and manage your images.

After you upload your images you can reorder them using our drag-and-drop interface.

The image gallery feature is now available for all projects on all plan levels. Thank you to all of the creators that requested this feature and provided feedback on the implementation!

Check out our crowdfunding add-ons feature page if you’d like to find out more about how you can use BackerKit to manage your Kickstarter or Indiegogo survey add-ons or contact us if you’d like to find out more about how BackerKit can help you save hundreds of hours in the survey and pledge fulfillment process.

We’re proud to announce that the new BackerKit Digital Downloads system is now out of beta! We released the initial version in July and we’ve had several projects hammer on it over the past two months to help us turn our new Digital Downloads system into the best distribution platform for digital crowdfunding rewards.

The system is perfect for film and music projects that need to send out digital goods such as albums or video download codes. The Doubleclicks needed to distribute activity coloring books and digital versions of their new album, President Snakes, to 1,263 backers. They were able to use our system to automatically send each eligible backer a PDF download and a unique Bandcamp album download code.

Harebrained Schemes used the system to distribute 59,420 individual game keys and 149,546 file downloads to 32,776 backers for Shadowrun: Hong Kong. They had an impressive number of files because they had promised to deliver a variety of soundtracks, character portraits, sourcebooks, e-novels, audio commentaries, and art books. They were able to upload all of the files and set up the distribution rules to make sure that the right backers received the right downloads. Everything just worked.

Well, not exactly everything. Several backers started to inquire about unreleased digital items. These unreleased items weren’t present in their unique download page and backers were naturally concerned that maybe they were left out. We solved the problem by publishing a code change that displays unreleased downloads as “pending” downloads on the backers’ download page to let backers know what downloads are coming down the line.

The game keys looked like a challenge because they needed to distribute three different Shadowrun games across three different platforms (Steam, GOG, Humble) but it was painless with our system. The Hairbrained Schemes team used survey pledge questions to ask each backer to select a platform for each game and then used the survey data and the digital downloads system to automatically send out the right keys to each backer.

The extra time to test the system also allowed us to make several UI upgrades to make it easier for creators to create digital downloads and distribution rules. Check out our BackerKit Digital Downloads page to find out more about the system and to try downloading files and codes as a backer.

We built the system because project creators asked us to help solve their problems with distributing digital downloads to backers. We’re proud of the latest release but understand that we can always make it better. Please contact us if you’d like to suggest any improvements or if you want to find out more about how BackerKit can help you with your project!

At BackerKit, we’ve been helping crowdfunding project creators for nearly three years now. In the past few years, we’ve grown a lot, with the help of project creators around the world. Today marks a new step in our growth as we unleash our new website and brand redesign.

In starting the company, we were so focused on creating the best tools possible to help project creators that we honestly only allocated about 15 minutes to designing our initial branding. Between then and now, we’ve created so many awesome tools and helped over a thousand creators to keep their biggest fans happy. We’ve decided to update our branding to reflect what we’ve become—and to better reflect what we feel BackerKit has come to mean to project creators and their backers, alike.

To celebrate the crowdfunding journey, we have a new set of BackerKit Brand Assets to share with the community. Add the badge and banner anywhere you like, be it on your Kickstarter page, website, or desktop computer background—you know you want to ;-). We hope you’ll wear the BackerKit badge with pride, and that you’ll reap the rewards of the extra sense of security that it signifies to your backers.

We thank you for joining us on our journey and for asking us to join you on yours. As always, we’ll continue to improve our creator tools for the crowdfunding community by listening closely to your feedback and working with you, hand in hand.  We’ve loved helping so many people along the way, and we look forward to the exciting new voyages in crowdfunding that await you!

Keep your eyes peeled for more exciting updates in the coming months, and don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

Yours,

Team BackerKit

Keep in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

One thing we hear from DIY project creators of all sizes is that making labels for shipping your crowdfunded project is harder than it should be.

BackerKit Postage is the easiest way to generate shipping labels for your backers. You don’t need to have used BackerKit for your project, and you can even use it if your campaign ended awhile ago.

We’ve been thinking hard about ways we can give back to the community and provide tools for every project creator, large or small, to make their life easier. Which is why we are making BackerKit Postage completely free for all project creators. 

Thank you for supporting us throughout an amazing first year! BackerKit is excited to offer three new features, all designed to help your backers help you:

We have already rolled out a major site redesign for your backers.

When they visit your BackerKit, backers will love how easy it is to answer reward questions, update their shipping address, and purchase add-ons. It’s simple, it’s streamlined for mobile, and it’s slick (further improvements are coming soon). And backers will be happy to know they can return to review and update their info anytime. As a project creator, you can check it out yourself by logging in to BackerKit and selecting ‘Preview as a Backer.’

You can now easily take pre-orders on BackerKit.

Want to offer items to new supporters after your crowdfunding campaign has already ended? We have a newly designed pre-order site for every project. It’s made for mobile and easy to navigate. Take as many pre-orders as you want––they’re included with your BackerKit. With your pre-order and backer information together in a single platform, you can stay on top of your project with minimal hassle. Project creators can turn on their pre-order sites by logging in to BackerKit.

We’ve also introduced stronger social tools to help your project gain exposure.

Backers can easily tweet when they finish your BackerKit, and let the world know how proud they are to support your project. Now, with our pre-ordering feature, their friends can support you as well!

As always, let us know if there are other features you’d like to see us add or improve.

Love,
Team BackerKit