Kickstarter - collaborators & permissions (boring but important)

OK, I realise this is not the most exciting subject, but if you’re a Kickstarter creator I think it’s important.

When you’re running a campaign you can set it up so that multiple people can work on your project. As Kickstarter put it: “From the Project Collaborators page you can invite members of your team to manage different aspects of your project.”

If people are helping you with your page design - writing the copy and adding photos for example, then this is a useful feature.

It also comes into play if you’re working third-parties on things like marketing and you want to allow access to some aspects of your campaign.

However, I don’t think it’s particularly clear how it all works. When it comes to working with outside agencies you’ve not worked with before, it’s important you understand what access to critical parts of your campaign you’re giving them.

Project collaborators on Kickstarter

There are a few different types of permission you can grant to a collaborator.

It’s not really a hierarchy of permissions, but I assume it was designed to try and meet the needs of different collaborator personas.

There are three sections to the permissions setup, with some sub-options within them.

1. Edit project

2. Manage community

3. Coordinate fulfilment

Collaborator permissions

Warning

Firstly, a really important thing to realise is that all collaborators can see your project dashboard, which includes all backer activity, and a breakdown of your funding by individual referrers.

Even a collaborator with what seems like the lowest levels of access such as “Update project FAQs” or “Post comments and mark comments as spam” can still see all this project data.

All collaborators can see your project dashboard

Whether or not you’re happy with that is up to you, so be careful who you give access to.

What this means is that if you’re working with multiple people, they can all see the data. So for example if you’re working with more than one marketing partner, they can all see each other’s referral work.

Some campaigns work with loads of project collaborators and it’s unfortunate you can’t control these permissions with finer granularity.

Multiple project collaborators

God mode

With that caveat out of the way, the permissions are a bit more intuitive, if not necessarily all equally useful.

Edit project is one to be careful with. There are two parts to this.

1. Make edits to your project's basic info, story, rewards, and Spotlight page

2. Update project FAQs

I’m not sure anyone would ever use that second one, but it does what it says.

The first one allows people to change almost anything on your project so be careful who you assign that to.

Thankfully however there are some key things only a creator can do. Setting up payment details for example, so that a collaborator could never change bank account details and run off with your money.

Not quite "god mode"

Sharing your Backer Report

The “Coordinate fulfillment” permission allows you to share your backers’ details if you want someone to help you out with shipping rewards.

There are two slightly differing levels of access here, as shown below.

(Note that you can chose only the first sub-option, but if you only have the second box checked, it won’t work and the collaborator will see nothing.)

Two levels of Backer info access

One final thing to note is that the project menu on the left hand side of the Kickstarter project page doesn’t necessarily reflect a collaborators permissions. Sometimes the relevant links are greyed out when access isn’t available, other times the link is still active but just goes to kickstarter.com. (A bug for Kickstarter to fix please.)

…

So in summary, the collaborator feature in Kickstarter is powerful, but rather crudely implemented so be thoughtful about who you give access to.

If I’ve missed anything or you think I’ve got any of this wrong, please do get in touch. And as always if there’s anything else you’d like me to cover in this blog, or if you’d like specific feedback on your own project, do let me know.