What to put in your Kickstarter Press Kit

The dream for anyone running a Kickstarter is to have people talking about and sharing it. Seeing your project written up in an article online is a real buzz and is a great way to drive people to your page.

Making it happen is not easy, but there are lots of things you can do to increase the chances.

In a previous post I wrote about tactics to earn you free coverage for your Kickstarter. You could also pay for it or work with a PR agency.

Whichever way you go, a key part of all strategies is to put together a Press Kit for your project. And this may well be easier than you think since you’ve pretty much done all the work anyway in putting your Kickstarter project page together.

You’ll most likely see press releases shared by creators at the bottom of their Kickstarter page. But I’ve also noticed that some people put them right at the top - especially if their campaign is gaining lots of (maybe unexpected) traction.

`Press links on various Kickstarter campaign pages`

What to include

In many ways you’ll just be repeating a lot of the content on your Kickstarter, but that’s fine.

A journalist or blogger might not be familiar with the layout of a Kickstarter page so your job is to make their job easier. They’re probably used to seeing press releases so it could be more accessible to them in a standard press release format. Since you’ve done the original work anyway, why not make the extra bit of effort and reformat it slightly for them.

But you also want to stand out, so don’t make it too generic.

Press release

There are plenty of press release templates online, but the main point here is to summarise in words the who, what, where, when, how of your Kickstarter project. Include quotes and any appropriate testimonials.

Since your press release will be an online document you can embed links to your photos and other assets in it. Also remember to link to your actual Kickstarter campaign page (preferably using a Kickstarter referral link).

A typical press release might be a one-page document, but feel free to experiment. I came across this one below from Tidbyt which was a nicely-produced slide presentation.

Images and videos

Maybe even more important than words are pictures and videos.

It goes without saying that good quality photography is important, but also think about practical things like using understandable file naming and sensible image resolutions. As I did below, you can even offer a high-res and a low-res version of the same images.

Think about how the assets will be used too. You could offer different aspect ratios, including some square images that might fit the style of a particular publication. And, as objectively wrong as a portrait orientation videos are, they could still be useful for people to share on social media such as Instagram or TikTok.

Remember, your job is to make it as easy as possible for someone to write-up your story. If they have to wade through a load of images of varying sizes and file names like DSCF_20230415_090525335.jpg they could easily give up.

JPEG vs PNG vs GIF

It’s OK to use JPEG files for pure photography as the file sizes will generally be smaller, but if you have pictures including words or graphics you’ll probably be better off using PNG files.

You may already have resized your best images to use on your Kickstarter page (Kickstarter will scale down all images to 680px wide anyway). Those could be great to use as low-res images in your press kit, but will be too small for some people so make sure you have higher resolution ones too.

If you’ve got some fun animated GIFs on your project page you should add them to your press kit. But be aware that they don’t always look great quality and some platforms might not support them.

(An excellent tool for GIF making is ezgif.com)

How to share it all

One you’ve put everything together you’ll need to share it in a neat package. Since printed press releases and faxes aren’t really a thing anymore, you’ll be sharing your press kit online.

If you have your own website you could always do it there, but an easier and more common approach is to put it all in a Google Drive, Dropbox, or similar repository.

This is an obvious point, but make sure you give it all the right sharing access! Test it with an incognito browser session or send it to a friend to check.

I don’t think your press kit is likely to make or break your project, but you should definitely put one together.

As I said before, you should’ve already done most of the work anyway so why not. It’s also a great opportunity to hone your story even more. The process of writing a concise press release and choosing a small number of product photos to show off your idea will help you focus on what’s really important in your pitch.