Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Why Kickstarter Was Chosen To Make Employment Human
Why did we choose Kickstarter for the Jobhop campaign?
There's quite a lot of crowdfunding sites about these days so when it come to having to choose one there was a bit of indecisiveness.
A few of them to choose from were:
crowdcube
Crowdfunder
Crowd2Fund
Rockethub
But for us the top two were Indiegogo and Kickstarter , these seemed to be the main two that people talked about. Whenever any of us said we might do a crowdfunding campaign to get people to join us on the mission, the answer always was " which one Indiegogo or Kickstarter? "
Because this is our first crowd funding campaign we wanted to play it as safe as possible, we needed to be able to make sure that if we needed support then we would get that support immediately. We wanted to use a platform that people had heard of because what we didn't want was having to explain to people who the crowdfunding platform was and how it worked as well as explaining to them what we were crowdfunding for. So it seemed an obvious choice Indigogo or Kickstarter, but which one?
That's when we started to ask lots of questions to try and make a decision on one of them.
We had only heard good reports about both platforms so we had to dig deeper to make the right choice for Jobhop.
This is our list for the jobhop pros and cons:
Support
Support was a big one for us and we'd heard really good things about support for both platforms, in fact some people really raved over the support that they'd received with Indiegogo and at one point those raving fans were beginning to sway it for us in favour of Indiegogo. What swung it for us in favour of KIckstarter in the end was the support of the huge KIckstarter community. It seemed that whatever platform you were chatting on there was always a KIckstarter group with lots of people genuinely wanting to help you. These communities included people who had done their first Kaickstarter campaign, people who had done more than one, people who just loved being part of other KIckstarter missions and KIckstarter experts who had done their own KIckstarter campaigns and had helped many others successfully crowdfunding through Kickstater for them.
Social proof
Again, because this is our first time at crowdfunding it's good to have some social proof. People we know personally who have used crowdfunding to raise money had used Kickstarter, we couldn't find one person we knew who'd used Indiegogo. A couple of those people were unsuccessful in raising the money but they had a good experience with Kickstarter and they said would use Kickstarter again to crowdfund.
Exposure
The people we spoke to all said that even if your campaign failed to raise the funds on either platform, the exposure you can get can help tremendously. With that in mind we looked at what platform could provide maximum exposure and we decided on Kickstarter. The amount of people who use Kickstarter outweighs Indiegogo, that's not just from the people on there creating Kickstarter campaigns but for the many people who use it regularly to become early adopters of all things shiny and new. Kickstarter is definitely the platform that attracts the traffic, it's the place that people talk about, journalists and generally has a constant buzz about it.
All or nothing
On Indiegogo you don't have to reach your goal to receive the funding, you can opt to still take the funds even if you fall short of your goal, it's very appealing for many people. It didn't appeal to us, the reason being is we've clearly worked out how much funding it will take to get the development done and the full amount is required.You may say that we could get just part of the development done if we only received part of the funding, that is true however it wouldn't be fair for the people joining us on this journey. The journey would become very stop and start and could be quite frustrating for all concerned, with that in mind we decided to go for all or nothing. Indiegogo caters for all or nothing as well as part funded but we just liked how Kickstarter was geared up for all or nothing campaigns. If we were to try a part funding campaign in the future, the fairest way would probably to set it up for mini targets. For example: Target 1 £x amount would achieve ... Target 2 £x amount would achieve ... and so on, that way everyone involved would be completely clear on what they would be helping to achieve and everything would be transparent.
So that's some of the reasons why we chose to crowdfund using KIckstarter
We're hoping you can join us on the journey to "Make employment human" follow us on KIckstarter, choose a reward and join in.
- Random