Nuts & Bolts – How to Structure a Kickstarter
[Read our full Nuts & Bolts series]
Some of the best advice if you’re looking to Kickstart your board game is to look at and follow a lot of board game Kickstarters. Pledging (even $1) to a lot of indie projects is even better as you get a front row seat for how other creators are engaging with their communities and running their campaigns.
That said, it never hurts to have a quick guide to make sure your campaign hits all the important points.
Since I’m in the process of creating our Sigil Kickstarter it felt like a good opportunity to outline my Kickstarter page best practices & structure of a page.
Technical Specifications
Kickstarter is a fairly inflexible platform. It doesn’t offer flexibility in terms of fonts that are used, it automatically adds spacing between images and videos, and doesn’t support complicated design, html, or java.
Kickstarter project images are a 16:9 ratio (1024x576 pixels).
Kickstarter story pages are 680 pixels wide (and essentially as long as you want). Most prevailing advice is to upload 680 pixel wide images (which is what we did for Nut Hunt).
This is bad advice.
Kickstarter automatically compresses images – even if they fit perfectly. So, 680 pixel wide images don’t look quite as crisp as they should.
What we’re found (and are doing for Sigil) is to make all of our images 1360 pixels wide. They are looking much crisper after Kickstarter’s compression.
Overall Structure
This is the overall structure we used for Nut Hunt. The rough ordering is fairly typical – although you do have a lot of flexibility over the ordering of sections.
The goal is to build a cohesive story that draws in backers and gives them all the information they need to make a decision around your game.
Headline Image
Brief Gameplay Hook
Pledge Levels
What’s in the Box
How to Play
Stretch Goals
Playtesting Links
Social Media
Reviews & Previews
Shipping
Timeline
Credits
Some of these sections are self explanatory, others we’ll go into a little more detail on. As I mentioned above, it’s your Kickstarter, so you have a lot of flexibility around how you structure it.
Headline Image
This is what I call the first image on the Kickstarter Story or Campaign section (other people might have a different term for it). It will have the game name, some cool graphics showing either game components or the game in progress, and high-level information like age range, and play time.
This image sets the tone for the entire campaign, and should be a good template for how you are handling things like banners, common graphic design elements, fonts, etc.
Stretch Goals
There’s a lot to unpack around stretch goals, and I am not convinced that I have fully mastered how to properly structure them, plan them and think through social goals versus monetary goals.
One small piece of advice – and something that worked really well for us with our Nut Hunt campaign is to remain flexible with your goals.
This both means only revealing a few goals at a time – so you have flexibility to shift things around and change targets, and being flexible with temporarily reducing goal levels (we did “Stretch Goal Flash Sales” to energize our community).
Social Proof - Reviews, Previews & Quotes
Previews and reviews are absolutely necessary for building trust in a campaign. The most common way to add social proof to a campaign is to have a reviews and previews section on the campaign page, and separately to pepper the page throughout with choice quotes.
This is the approach that we took for Nut Hunt and are taking for Sigil.
A less common but still effective approach is to spread review and preview videos throughout the campaign between other sections.
What are some interesting features that you’ve seen on Kickstarters?
