I admit, I’m feeling a little blue right now — I’ve just had to cancel the SLF’s Portolan Writing Project Kickstarter, after putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into promoting it over the last month. In the last hour, we’d gotten up to almost $5200 in pledges, with 95 backers, but we’d set a goal for $13,500, so we clearly weren’t going to make it.
It’s the first time I’ve had a Kickstarter fail, so it’s hitting me a little hard, but I’m trying to take it as a learning experience.
The plan is to re-launch with a more modest goal — instead of trying to put together 90 new lessons, I think we’ll aim for 30, which should be enough to put together at least 3-4 ‘courses,’ if we’re strategic about them. We’re also going to tweak the reward tiers, to hopefully make them more appealing to folks.
I’m thinking maybe we aim for a very modest $3000, with a stretch goal for $5000. That really should be do-able! And possibly do it over a shorter time-frame; two weeks instead of a month, just to get it done before the year ends, so we can better plan our activities for first quarter of 2022.
The big question is when to re-launch — December is apparently the worst month to run a Kickstarter (according to Kickstarter), but since we’re mostly trying to recapture the people who already pledged, it seems like it makes sense to go ahead and aim for that before it slides off their radar.
I’m going to take a day or so to think about (and finish off my last day of teaching for the semester), and then make a decision. Opinions welcome.
