A few weeks ago, my first Kickstarter project ended.  It was a project I ran for my 11-year old daughter who is working to publish a children’s book called The Clown That Lost His Funny.

She raised $5,500 in 31 days.  She is still working hard on the illustrations, but I thought I would take the time to write down some of the lessons we learned from a successful Kickstarter campaign.

1.  A video is worth a thousand pictures.

Kickstarter says a video is the most effective thing you can do to meet your goal, and they have stats to prove it.  According to Kickstarter, projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%).  I’m no Albert Einstein, but that means projects with videos are way more successful.

Videos are simple to make these days, and they are one of the most effective ways to tell stories.  For this project, Lauren and I just sat in her room and I shot simple video with my iPhone.  We edited on iMovie and uploaded it quickly.  The entire project took about an hour…here’s the video.

2.  The time to build a platform is before you need one.

Michael Hyatt says a platform is what you stand on to get your message out.  It harkens back to the days of the theater when people would stand on a literal platform to shout their message to a gathering crowd.  Today, platforms are digital.  And your audience isn’t crowded around a wooden box, they are your friends on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn and email addresses on your mailing list.

Too many people launch an idea before doing the groundwork of building a platform to sustain it.   They launch their product or service or idea only to realize there’s nobody to support it.

My platform is not huge, but I’ve spent some time attracting some followers on Twitter and building a mailing list through MailChimp.

3.  Specific request beat generic pleas every time.

I worked social media pretty hard for about a month, and I’m sure my friends and followers grew weary of hearing about Hairy the Clown.  In fact, more than one person told me they hoped the project would be funded soon so I would stop talking about it.

I’d estimate about 30% of backers came from social broadcasts on Facebook or Twitter.  While this is substantial, it would have never been enough to reach the goal.  Most people donated because they were specifically asked.

I let Lauren hijack my address book and send specific emails.  She called friends and family members on the phone and asked them to donate.  She passed out bookmarks at lunch and asked her classmates to get their parents to donate.

The principal here is really important – you’ve got to do more than throw out blanket pleas for help – you have to be willing to look someone in the eye and specifically ask them for help.  If you need someone to step up, a specific request will beat a blanket email.  If you need volunteers, a face-to-face request will work better than a generic stage announcement.

4.  You can’t spend retweets.

Lots of people retweeted and shared stuff to their followers, but those retweets did very little to reach the goal.  At first, I was excited when I saw someone with tons of followers RT it.  You can see how easy it would be to think that someone willing to share a link would surely support the project.  But in reality, most people who shared the project on Twitter or Facebook did NOT back the project.

Social Media has perpetuated the idea that by sharing or mentioning something, you’ve supported it.  But awareness that doesn’t lead to action is no good.  Spreading a message might send goodwill, but at least on Kickstarter, it didn’t help us reach the funding goal.  In fact, raising awareness without acting might have the opposite effect of desensitizing people over time.

I’m not at all upset; I’m just communicating reality.  I see people share causes and pleas for help all the time and I rarely click on those generic messages.  But when people reach out personally, it’s usually a different story.

5.  Mini deadlines make a big project small.  

Raising $5,500 the internet to publish a children’s book might not seem like a big goal, but I’ve never done anything like this before.  Lauren and I thought it was a big goal, and we were really nervous setting it.

So as we moved through the 40 days, we set little milestones.  Kickstarter actually provides simple tracking and reporting, so this made it easy.  There were several times when we would push harder to cross a milestone, whether it was the $2,000 mark or the halfway point.

These smaller goals not only kept us engaged in the process, they gave us the opportunity to stop and start a few different times along the way.  If you’ve got a  big project, breaking it up into smaller projects with milestones along the way is definitely the way to go.

6.  It takes focus to finish.

There’s a reason Kickstarter won’t let you run two projects at once – it’s hard enough to be successful at one.

And reaching the goal took hard work every day of this project.  We had to set aside all of our creative efforts – the editing and illustrating of the book itself – and focus on the fundraising.  We worked on something every day, whether it was updating backers, emailing family and friends, or writing blog posts about the project.  Every day, we worked on spreading the word.

Execution is underrated.  It’s sexier to start things, but if you want to be successful, you have to do less so you can focus more.  If you have seven top priorities, chances are, all of them will be average.  You can’t excel at anything if you’re trying to do everything.  So we made the decision to stop working on the book itself so we could focus on raising the money.

7.  Deadlines drive decisions.

I learned this principle from Casey Graham and it’s a part of the special offering coaching inside of Giving Rocket.

We set a deadline of 40 days to accomplish this project, 10 days longer than Kickstarter recommends, but far shorter than the maximum of 90 days the platform allows.  It seems that deadlines that are too far off don’t encourage participation.

50% of the backer activity happened within the first three days or the last three days, with the rest of the support spread out throughout the middle weeks.

As the deadline approached, it was so cool to watch people who had been following the project to jump in or share the news with others.

No matter what business, product or event you’re talking about, deadlines can help.  They create a sense of urgency.