Your kickstarter project is a product even if it isn’t
Here lies some musings I’ve been mulling over in the middle of my live kickstarter campaign for a pop up art gallery for those affected by homelessness or blindness.We’re almost halfway there with 4 days to go. Support if you can, we could use your help. (UPDATE: This project is fully funded and will be launching in October)
The more I design digital products the more I compare analog experiences to digital experiences, whether that be conversations to text messages or live audiences to a user group. When making my kickstarter campaign for a pop up art gallery for those affected by homelessness or blindness, I thought of the community as just that: my user group. The campaign itself is my product and each day I continue to iterate on it and learn from the people using it along with the people are benefitting from it. My project is to raise funds for a venue but that process is a product in itself.
Addressing your users
Defining this user group was a little more nuanced than most given the state of their livelihood. For the homeless, many people in the community although they don’t have stable housing don’t identify as homeless. So the question becomes, how do you address a community as a whole when individuals within don’t agree with the label assigned to them no matter how objective. It would be similar to a company telling a user “We want people like you, we want millennials” and the person responding in kind “But I’m not a millennial, I don’t identify as that”. As often as possible and when not presented with a character limit I tried to refer to the group as “affected by” or “connected to” homelessness or blindness. That level of ambiguity allowed me some credibility within the community but more importantly it communicated humility. As a creator you can’t label your users you can only address them as they identify within themselves. With marginalized communities acting as my user group, my backers represented my investors.
Backers as Investors
What venture capitalist are to startups your backers are to your kickstarter project. It begins and ends with you but it only takes flight if someone is footing the bill. Moreover, people can only foot the bill if they believe in your business or your product. And for me, the easiest route to belief is participation. Much of this project is me trying to abstract myself from the idea and act more as a facilitator behind the scenes. This led to me staying out of the original video as much as possible and trying to take away show a polished concept rather than a work in progress. After speaking with some advisors I started to think how can backers resonate to project when the creator tries to separate his/herself. This is much like the relationship between a VC and a founder: the more hands on and front and center the founder is the more faith the VC will have in the product and the process.
The more faith the better these parties can work together. This is exactly what I want the backer relationship to be: participatory. This project isn’t about me so much as it is about a community coming together to provide an opportunity who those might not otherwise have one. There’s a delicate balance between personalization and promotion and Im finding how to balance on the tightrope as I go. A big part of that balance is showing personality but keeping your focus of the goal and highlighting the community and not myself. The best way to do that is keeping your focus front and center. For me that meant breaking down cost and priorities.
Authenticity
A major part of branding is deciding who you are, what you stand for, and what your going to offer as a service or business. For a kickstarter that was always every clear because they aligned directly with my personal beliefs. Anything labeled as a reward I will be designing myself or have already designed.
A major drawback to this project is the inability to secure artwork beforehand. At the risk of loosing trust or I made sure not to ask artist for work beforehand. I wanted to make sure I was offering them something before I was taking anything, whether that be original artwork or even a picture of new artwork. It’s one of the main reason why artwork doesn’t exist on the campaign page.
Features empower users
When thinking about digital interfaces we often try to make the features that our users want. We try to give users the features we believe will empower them the most. I would like to believe I pursued this project in the same manner; not so much that I was providing a feature to users but rather an avenue via a venue to a community so they could empower themselves. Designers as a community tend to get a little ego heavy and rush to be the white knight trying to solve for all user needs. In the words of designer justin rheinfrank “designers can only design the conditions of an experience”. I think with this project I tried to do just that: for the users I designed conditions in which backers could provide my users a venue that they could use to showcase their work and gain a profit from it, therefore empowering themselves. I think that’s my goal as a designer, to help users empower themselves.
If you also want to help empower artists affected by homelessness and blindness feel free to back and share this project.
