Knowing how to set your Kickstarter goal is a tricky but an extremely important part of your crowdfunding campaign. Funding goals for your Kickstarter project involve a lot of factors, but the bottom line is that the goal has to be reached. The first thing to understand about crowdfunding goals, particularly on Kickstarter where your campaign’s goal needs to be reached for you to get anything, is that you actually have two goals to consider – the public goal and your personal goal. To properly identify those two goals you need to ask yourself two questions: “How much do I * need * to raise for my project?” “How much do I * want * to raise for my project?” These are two very different questions. More often than not, the trick to achieving your funding goals for your Kickstarter campaign is to set your goal at the level you * need * to raise. The higher sum – your personal goal – can still be reached, but you have a higher chance of reaching both goals if you use the smaller sum as your official public goal. The reason for this is very simple – the lower your campaign’s goal is, the higher percentage of it will be completed with each consecutive contribution. If you have a goal of $10,000 and someone contributes $500, that’s 5% of your campaign goal! However, if you’ve set your goal to $100,000, then those $500 will be just 0.5% of your campaign goal. The reason this is important is that fundraising platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo tend to feature “successful” campaigns on their main pages, exposing them to communities of millions of people. So, when wondering how to set your Kickstarter goal, choose the lower number – the one you absolutely need to hit. Once the contributions start rolling and you gain traction among the platform’s audience, you’ll find it much easier to reach and pass your initial goal. In fact, by doing this, you’ll have a higher chance of reaching your real funding goals for your Kickstarter campaign and bringing your vision to reality!
