On Kickstarter, Female Backers 2–3x More Valuable Than Males
Need Early Crowdfunding Donors? Don’t Ask Men.
On Kickstarter, as in life, women do most of the work, and then men take the credit. How much more work? Well, for most projects, it’s about 200 to 300 percent more.
When I say women are doing most of the ‘work’, I’m referring to how much their donations will increase a campaign’s likelihood of hitting their goal. Kickstarter itself points out that campaigns which reach the crucial 20% funding mark have a 79% chance of success, versus 43% for all projects in general. This means that an early donor is worth almost twice as much as a late donor.
When you combine that multiplier with the fact that average Kickstarters have 61% more females in the first quintile (20%) of donors than the last, it approaches a multiplier of 3x. We came to this figure after analyzing 50 successful ‘middle-of-the-road’ Kickstarter projects at random. It appears that men are either procrastinators (a highly original thesis) or don’t like to support projects that haven’t yet reached some sort of tipping point.
It’s important to point out that both Kickstarter and Indiegogo recommend that projects raise their first 20 or even 30 percent from friends and family. As a friends-and-family crowdfunding platform ourselves, we know the importance of your social capital network when looking for early-stage funding.
The data can be far from conclusive, however. Kickstarter doesn’t list exact donation amounts with donors, so we have to make the assumption that for the site as a whole, individual donation amounts from men and women are roughly the same.
Other Recent Support of Women’s Superiority in Crowdfunding
In the last two months, two different studies, one in the US and one in Israel, have shown that women may have an edge over men when it comes to their project’s chances of crowdfunding success. This is in contrast to previous studies that showed a significant ‘funding gap’ between the crowdfunding campaigns led by male versus female entrepreneurs. To help close the many types of funding gaps that exist for women, as well as promote female entrepreneurship in general, many female-specific funding sites have emerged, including Moola-Hoop, a crowdfunding platform specifically for female founders.
When it comes to gender and Kickstarter:
More donors are male (55%)
Male donors are 2x more likely to give to male campaign owners
But….women have a higher success rate (69.5% vs 61.4%) regardless of goal size
Many articles on gender and funding focus only on the entrepreneurs themselves, but not of the people giving the money. When they do look at women and men giving money on Kickstarter, they look at the total pledges in sum, after the campaign is over. This is missing a crucial point: the first 20% of the goal is many times more important than the last 20%, especially for the average artist or small business owner.
We have discovered similar statistics when it comes to our own users on TrustLeaf, where we help early-stage entrepreneurs raise money from friends and family.
