All My Kickstarter dashboards

As a creator, when your launch your Kickstarter campaign you get a dashboard page showing a performance overview.

At the top of it you can see your funding progress and a breakdown of where your pledges have come from.

For example, here’s what that looked like at the end of my latest project.

I’ve written previously about the right-hand side of this - the pie chart part showing an overview of where your pledges have come from.

The other key part of the Kickstarter dashboard is a chart showing funding progress over time. Every chart tells a story.

I’ve looked before in depth at all of my Kickstarter dashboards individually, and now I want to look at all of them together. We can compare them to see similarities and differences.

The data

Getting straight into the data, I’ve taken the funding progress charts from six of my past Kickstarter campaigns and overlaid them on the single chart below.

Time is on the x axis and funding on the y axis. The dot on each line shows the point at which the projects hit 100% funding.

Note that the funding goals, total funding and project duration vary, but I’ve normalised both axes so I can show them all together in this visualisation.

Insights

What can we take from that data?

Typically a Kickstarter project, a reasonably well-run one anyway, will have a good start to the campaign, followed by a relatively slow middle section, and then a jump at the end as backers come on board before it’s too late.

That change in gradient over the course of the campaign results in an S-shape a bit like the hypothetical example below.

You can see that most of the lines for my projects roughly share this characteristic shape.

Notably however, my projects 1 and 2 (green and orange respectively) show some short but really steep gradients at seemingly random points in the middle of the campaigns. This is particularly obvious on the orange line in the first chart above.

In both cases, those were caused by those projects being picked up by press and a resulting flurry of backers. That was of course great, but a more controlled, smoother progress chart is a recipe for a more relaxing experience! My latter projects show more graceful progress towards successful outcomes.

Looking at the dot on each line showing when each project hit 100% funding, you can see that those dots have moved steadily to the left for each consecutive project. That’s exactly what I want. Reaching the target as early as possible not only takes the pressure off, but it helps build that early momentum which will drive a project from strength to strength.

The last four projects on that chart all reached their targets on day one.

Irregular Projects

You probably noticed the odd numbering on the list of projects in the first chart above. Projects 5 and 8 are missing because they were mini projects that I ran as part of Kickstarter’s “Make 100” initiative.

As with all projects, the funding progress charts still tell the story of the campaign, but those projects had limited rewards available and much smaller scopes so the data isn’t really comparable to my other Kickstarter campaigns.

Remembering that the funding amounts on the y axis don’t share the same scale, here’s what those two more unusual projects looked like overlaid onto the other “normal” projects.

If you want to understand what’s going on with those stepped lines, I’ve written previously about the data behind those two campaigns, here and here.

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When you run your first Kickstarter campaign you probably won’t be able to keep your eyes of your project dashboard. I know I was obsessed by it — hitting refresh every five minutes hoping for the numbers to increase each time.

For my subsequent campaigns I’ve learnt to focus on the things that drive those numbers, rather than just waiting and hoping they’ll change.

Once a campaign is over though, it’s always an interesting exercise to look back at the funding progress charts, especially now that I have several to compare. The charts show the narrative arc of each project. I can often viscerally remember every bump and curve.

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I hope you also found these visualisations interesting. As I mentioned, you can find much more detail about the data behind each individual Kickstarter project in some of my earlier posts. You can find those, and more Kickstarter data-related articles here.

I think it would be interesting to do a similar exercise with my overlaid funding progress data but without normalising the y-axis. Maybe I’ll do that next week. If you’d like to catch that make sure you sign up below to my newsletter.