Kickstarter Tip - Communication

My tip for today was highlighted beautifully by a comment from one of our backers:

"I hope this project provides a framework that other kickstarter projects can follow. Transparency, frequent updates, and listening to feedback are all critical parts of the kickstarter process. Kudos to you and your team for doing it the right way. I was hesitant to back the project until this most recent update, now I'm really excited to see the process through."

If there is a single, most important thing that all Kickstarter project creators should do, it is definitely to communicate effectively with your backers. This takes several paths:

• Reply to every single message.
  • This includes comments, messages, tweets, emails, and phone calls. Literally everything, even if it is a simple 'Thank You'.
  • Reply immediately. If you are awake and have a smartphone, you have everything you need to respond to your backers.
  • Expect to answer the same question many times and answer it politely every time.
  • Never forget to thank them for their support, pledge, questions, etc in your reply.
• Listen to your backers
  • Your backers are the only reason you are doing so well. If they have a suggestion, pursue it. If they don't like something, change it. There will be times that you get conflicting suggestions and you will have to make the decision. But if you make it fairly, with careful thought and explain the reasoning, your backers will understand.
• Be transparent
  • When you think you have given backers enough information, give them twice as much. I see some projects that have 4 updates over a 30 day project. As I'm writing this, we have 11 updates and are on day 33 of 40. Communicate and then communicate some more.
  • The communication does have a fine line though. Your backers will receive an immediate email with all updates. So communicate, but don't spam. Lay out an update schedule and tell them what it is if you need to. We just informed our backers that we will post updates every Friday (at a minimum) until we ship the rewards, even if we don't have any new information.