
Kickstarter has enabled a private beta feature that’s starting to
show up for logged in project creators, offering a kind of community
knowledge base that lets users ask questions and provide answers to
other creators about crowdfunding and best practices. The so-called
Campus seems designed to act as a central repository for the kind of
advice that’s often being exchanged between crowdfunders anyway in
conversations every day, only centralized, archived and indexed on
Kickstarter itself.
Based on what we’ve seen from creators with access, the tool allows
users to subscribe to specific discussions, letting them get live
updates as answers are posted. Questions can also be browsed by
popularity, unanswered status or recency, and creators can pose a new
question if they find no one is discussing their specific issue just
yet.
Helping to pool expertise and provide a forum for discussing what
works and what doesn’t could help Kickstarter increase the general
success rate and overall quality of the projects that appear on its
site. Answers from creators who’ve already faced the rigmarole of not
only managing a funding campaign, but also of actually delivering on the
promises made during said campaign, should help newbies more easily
avoid some rookie mistakes.
I can’t help but think Campus, with its academic vibe, might act as a
building block for some kind of more focused and organized ‘school for
crowdfunders’ learning experience from KS at a later date; it benefits,
after all, from generally improving the quality of campaigns and
crowdfunded companies.
Spotlight
is a good knowledge repository, too, in addition to being a showcase
for past successes, and there’s the existing Creator Handbook and FAQ,
so the ingredients for that sort of thing are already coming together.
The Campus private beta is currently available to logged in creators,
which means those who either have already launched a project on
Kickstarter, or who have formally begun the process of setting one up.