What the data says about successful film crowdfunding campaigns

That wise man of film research Stephen Follows continues his investigation into crowdfunding with some practical tips.

In previous articles there have been 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, Stephen has used 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.

You can read all the tips here https://stephenfollows.com/film-crowdfunding-tips/

In doing this research Stephen found built an online tool which you can use too: Crowdfunding Inspirations.

It's totally free and it's an easy way to search through successful film crowdfunding campaigns (i.e. everyone listed has reached their funding goal)

https://stephenfollows.com/crowdfunding-inspirations/

Finally, if you want to learn more about Crowdfunding then check out Stephen's new course 'A Crash Course In Crowdfunding For Filmmakers'. You can see the full syllabus and watch some free previews at  https://stephenfollows.com/course/crowdfunding-for-filmmakers.