Film Crowdfunding Tips – What the Data Says You Should Do

Stephen Follows has crunched the hard data and posted another incredibly detailed set of useful tips to help in your crowdfunding campaign.

I’m continuing my investigation into crowdfunding and today I’m sharing some practical film crowdfunding tips. In previous articles I’ve looked at the number of projects, where they’re based, how much money they’re asking for and the day and time they’re launched. We’ve seen a few correlations with success, some predictable (projects which ask for less money do better) and some less so (projects which end on a Sunday fare poorest).

For this article, I thought I would use the data to give some specific film crowdfunding tips and nuggets of advice to help you create a successful film crowdfunding campaign. This is the result of a data-crunching research project into the 47,809 film crowdfunding campaigns launched on Kickstarter between its inception in April 2009 and October 2015. In summary…

39% of Kickstarter film projects last 30 days (19% last under 30 days and 42% last over 30 days)
The projects with the highest success rates are 18 days long
The success rate for campaigns with a video is twice that of those without a video
The average length of Kickstarter videos is 3 minutes 20 seconds
Campaigns with videos between 3 to 4 minutes were the most successful, with a success rate of 51.9%
Campaigns by people who launched a project within a week of joining Kickstarter failed 74% of the time
Those who joined Kickstarter over a year before they launched a campaign had a success rate of 49%
Kickstarter film projects offer an average of 8.6 rewards
Those offering 30 rewards succeeded 63.9% of the time
On average, creators used 2,682 characters to describe their campaigns.