Kickstarter - Fund creative projects

Backers on Kickstarter are passionate, creative visionaries who take joy and find connection in supporting new ideas and bringing them to life. Explore projects across categories such as art, design, film, games, hardware, and music, and pledge to your favorites directly within the app. Contribute to making the world a more innovative and creative place while receiving fantastic (and often exclusive) rewards.

Creators can utilize the app to manage their projects on-the-go and engage with their backers.

Why Offer Late Pledges?

Increased Funding: The primary advantage of Late Pledges is the potential for additional funding. Many backers may have missed the campaign for various reasons, and Late Pledges gives them a second chance to contribute. This can be especially beneficial for projects that have fallen slightly below their stretch goals.

Community Building: Offering Late Pledges keeps the momentum going and allows the creator to continue engaging with their community. It provides an opportunity to maintain interest and excitement around the project, which can be crucial for long-term success.

Reduced Backer Confusion: You no longer need to set up a spotlight page and redirect traffic to another platform or website. You can keep all activity and traffic on your same campaign URL, which results in reduced drop-off overall. Instead of backers clicking on an unknown link, setting up a secondary account on another tool, and logging in to pledge, you can streamline the process on a single destination.

Enhanced Backer Reach: Late Pledges attracts a higher percentage of NEW backers (25%+) than the crowdfunding stage. Overall, 80% of late pledge backings to repeat creators come from backers who had never backed that creator before, compared to 64% during the core campaign. This indicates that by enabling Late Pledges on Kickstarter, creators can reach a new audience of backers, even if their main campaign also ran on Kickstarter.

Improved Ad Spend ROI: Utilizing performance marketing on your campaign? With Late Pledges, you can increase the value of your ad spend at the end of the campaign by continuing to drive the project page to collect backings.

Collect Weekly Payouts: Other platforms traditionally pay creators late pledge contributions monthly. However, we have decided to issue weekly payouts to allow creators to be more flexible with their post-campaign timelines.

Flexibility for Backers: Late Pledges cater to backers who may have discovered the project late or were unable to pledge during the campaign due to financial constraints. By offering Late Pledges, creators demonstrate flexibility and inclusivity, fostering goodwill among their audience.

Unified Backer Experience: Kickstarter has a substantial network of engaged backers, with over 23 million total backers. Implementing Late Pledges on your crowdfunding campaign can significantly enhance your campaign's exposure compared to smaller crowdfunding platforms in the space.

How to Set Up Late Pledges in 3 Steps

Enable Late Pledge Before Your Campaign Ends

While in Project Build, go to your project basics tab and switch on the Late Pledge feature, which can be found under your project’s General Options.

Revise Your Rewards

Before your campaign ends, make sure to visit the Rewards section and prepare offerings for the Late Pledge period.

Adjust the cost slightly to account for any additional expenses from delayed pledges. We recommend increasing your Late Pledges offering by at least 10%.

Manage Add-Ons and Communicate with Backers

Include additional products or bonus items not originally available in your campaign to attract late backers.

Use Kickstarter’s communication tools to keep your backers informed with regular updates, maintain enthusiasm, and secure further commitments.

Rules to Remember:

1. Projects must create something to share with others.

Kickstarter can be used to create all sorts of things: art and gadgets, events and spaces, ideas and experiences. But every project needs a plan for creating something and sharing it with the world. At some point, the creator should be able to say: “It’s finished. Here’s what we created. Enjoy!”

2. Projects and backer statistics must be honest and clearly presented.

Our community is built on trust and communication. Projects can’t mislead people or misrepresent facts. Creators should be candid about what they plan to accomplish and how they plan to do it. When a project involves manufacturing and distributing something complex, like a gadget, we require projects to show backers a prototype of what they’re making, and we prohibit the use of misleading imagery. Creators should not misrepresent or artificially inflate the number of backers or amounts pledged to their projects.

    Prototype demonstration should reflect a product’s current state and should not include any CGI or special effects to demonstrate functionality that does not yet exist. If a project requires software and hardware integration, creators are required to show that functionality and any dependency clearly, or disclose that it has not yet been developed.

    Misleading imagery includes photorealistic renderings and heavily edited or manipulated images or videos that could give backers a false impression of a product’s current stage of development.

    Projects developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology or including AI-generated content are allowed in some situations, so long as the creator is transparent about how it will be used and they are contributing creativity to the project. Additional context on our rules about the use and development of AI can be found on our Creator Questions page.

3. Projects can’t fundraise for charity.

While nonprofits are welcome to launch projects on Kickstarter, projects can't promise to raise funds to donate to a charity or cause. Funds raised on Kickstarter must go towards facilitating the project outlined by the creator on the project page.

4. Projects can't offer equity.

Investment is not permitted on Kickstarter. Projects can't offer incentives like equity, revenue sharing, or investment opportunities.

5. Projects can't involve prohibited items.

We do not allow any of these things：

    Any item claiming to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent an illness or condition (whether via a device, app, book, nutritional supplement, or other means).

    Contests, coupons, gambling, and raffles.

    Energy food and drinks.

    Offensive material (e.g., hate speech, encouraging violence against others, etc).

    Offering a genetically modified organism as a reward.

    Live animals. Projects cannot include live animals as a reward.

    Offering alcohol as a reward.

    Offering financial, money-processing, or credit services; financial intermediaries or cash-equivalent instruments; travel services (e.g., vacation packages); phone services (e.g., prepaid phone services, 900 numbers); and business marketing services.

    Political fundraising.

    Pornographic material.

    Projects that promote discrimination, bigotry, or intolerance towards marginalized groups

    Projects that share things that already exist, or repackage a previously-created product, without adding anything new or aiming to iterate on the idea in any way.

    Resale. All rewards must have been produced or designed by the project or one of its creators — no reselling things from elsewhere.

    Drugs, nicotine, tobacco, vaporizers and related paraphernalia.

    Weapons, replicas of weapons, and weapon accessories.

Steps to pledge to a project:

1. Head to the project page and click the “Back this project” button, or open the Reward tab, to see the available rewards.

    If you don't wish to receive a reward but still want to support the project, select the "Pledge without a reward" tier and enter your desired pledge amount.

2. Select your reward, and if it involves shipping, be sure to choose the appropriate country from the drop-down menu before clicking the “Pledge” button.

    For rewards marked as in-person local receipt, you will see the location listed with the reward.

    When a reward is digital there will be no shipping option.

3. On the next page you can choose to increase your pledge with add-ons, if the creator has created them. To add an available add-on reward, simply click the “Add” button next to it. You can also add some bonus support here too, if you’d like.

    Please note: If the main reward tier selected is digital it won’t be possible to add physical add-ons to your pledge.

4. Click “Continue” to go to the Pledge summary page. Here you can double-check your pledge details, including any selected add-ons, and the shipping country.

5. When ready, enter your payment details and check the box confirming that you understand that rewards aren’t guaranteed. To complete your pledge, click the “Pledge" button.

    Please note: It is not possible to split a pledge between multiple credit cards. You’ll need to provide one debit or credit card per pledge.

With the Kickstarter app, you can:

• Collaborate with like-minded backers to bring new ideas to fruition.

• Stay engaged with updates from projects you have supported.

• Bookmark your preferred projects and receive notifications before they conclude.

Project creators can effortlessly stay informed no matter where they are:

• Monitor funding progress easily.

• Manage comments and pledges effectively.

• Share updates and communicate with backers efficiently.