When Should You Send Out the Survey?

If you’ve been looking at Kickstarter practices on the websites elsewhere, you may have noticed there are many suggestions like this: ‘Wait as long as possible before sending the backer survey out.’ Well, I wouldn’t say this suggestion is wrong, but it wouldn’t make sense in most cases.

It is undeniable that this suggestion is reasonable in some cases, for example, backers could change their address at the last minute, or they may even try to change it after the order has been dispatched. While in other scenarios, backers may not update their address even if you remind them many times. That could be a good reason to hold on to the survey, but I believe the reasons below for sending it out soon after the project ends are more attractive.

Our best practice tells us you should send the survey within a few weeks after your project end on Kickstarter. Here’s reason why:

• Delayed response: it is not a surprise that you will have batch backers who won't back you for your survey request immediately… or at all. A considerable number of backers need more time to complete their survey. You might think after all it just is a time issue, but actually it will be a burden and concern to your full plan. The point I was trying to state is that, you may find yourself tottering along the shipping process if you wait too long to send out the backer survey
• Unknown Shipping Address: Not knowing your backer locations in advance isn't a major concern if you're employing the traditional approach of delivering all products to your apartment and handpacking them individually for backers all over the world (but it is helpful so you can estimate costs in advance). However, if you adopt the common and efficient way of sending pallets and large purchases of products directly to Canada, the EU, and the US, you must know where your backers are far ahead of time. This is critical. When you combine this with the first point, it becomes clear that you must complete the survey within a few weeks of the project's completion.
• Perception of Laziness: If you delay months and months to send out your survey, your backers will begin to believe you are unprepared. Updates are beneficial, but they do not always feel like progress. This is what the backer survey entails. Many backers have complained to us about how certain projects don't have their acts together, and one of the reasons they cite is the lack of an in time survey.
  

Keep in mind that you can only send your survey out for once through Kickstarter. There was only one shot. As a result, you don't want to speed through the survey. Make sure you have a list of all the questions you need answered from all of your backers.

What Are the Best Questions to Ask? They say you should only ask questions that you absolutely need to know, and that you should avoid questions about marketing or demographics. I can't find any further explanation, but I believe they're implying that you can't ask backers how they heard about your project or about their color, gender, religion, or other characteristics.

One challenging aspect of your project that you may not realize is that you must survey each reward tier separately. For each tier's survey, you had to enter the questions one by one. This is useful since you can ask different questions for different groups of people, and you don't have to ask backers to answer questions that don't pertain to them. However, if you have a lot of reward levels, it will take a long time.

If you want to keep track of all of your backers on one master spreadsheet after the campaign, having several sorts of questions can make it difficult to develop and manage that spreadsheet. So keep that in mind while you're building your questions and your reward levels as well.

Surveys aren't just for gathering information for manufacturing and shipping products, and Kickstarter does not allow demographic data to be collected through surveys.

Pro Tip: Choose a reward level with the fewest backers and send them a survey for a smoke test first, then wait a few minutes to see if any surveys have been completed. Then take a look at a completed survey to see whether it makes sense to you. This allows you to make any necessary changes about the format before sending the survey to other reward tiers.

What Alternatives Are There?

PledgeBox: PledgeBox is a Kickstarter certified pledge manager. Our up-sell and survey tool can let backers select their choice of products, upgrade rewards ( if you allow them) and update their shipping information. There is no upfront fee for the campaign survey, and only 3% of the additional sales generated through our survey upsell.