This project reviews the historical data of how different Kickstarter campaigns have behaved. The objective of this revision is to establish the best way forward for a play crowdfunding project in the US according to the retrospective data insights.
The client Louise wants to start a crowdfunding campaign to fund her play Fever, therefore, the results and conclusions obtained from this assessment aim to set up her campaign for success.
To determine the best strategy for Louise's crowdfunding campaign the following factor were evaluated:
- Launch date: To determine if the start date of the campaign had a significant effect on its outcome. A Pivot table was created to summarize and better review the data.
- Goals: The specific amount that is set to be collected could have an impact on the success rate of the campaign. To evaluate this case a complementary table was created classifying the campaigns by the monetary goal they were set to accomplish.
- For both cases only closed campaigns were evaluated, campaigns in the "Live" status were not included.
The data from 1369 Theatre category campaigns was used for this chart. The following line graph shows the number of theater campaigns that have succeeded (green line), failed (orange line) or been canceled (purple line) according to the month when they were launched.
As can be observed there were more successful than failed campaigns throughout the year, and the number of canceled campaigns remains almost constant through the months. The month of May has the highest count of crowdfunding campaigns with a total of 166, this month is also where the most successful campaigns were created with 111 successful campaigns. December contrasts with the less campaigns created. This month also has an almost equal number of successful and failed campaigns with 37 successful campaigns and 35 failed ones.
The following line graph shows a line chart of all projects within the Theater Category specific for the Plays subcategory. The X axis shows the monetary goal range, and the Y axis contains the percentage of campaigns that were successful, failed or were canceled for each monetary goal range. Successful campaigns are denoted in green, blue for failed campaigns and purple for those that were canceled.
The line graph shows that the success/fail ratio changes greatly depending on the monetary goal evaluated. The percentage of canceled campaigns remains constant throughout the different ranges. The highest percentage of successful campaigns is found in "Less than 1000" with 76%, followed closely with 73% of successful campaigns for those with a goal between "1000 to 4999”. This second range also contains the highest number of campaigns with a total of 534 projects. The success rate for campaigns in the "35000 to 39999" and "40000 to 44999" also shows favorable results with 67% of successful campaigns for both ranges. However, only 9 projects had these monetary objectives (6 projects in the "35000 to 39999" range and 3 projects in the "40000 to 44999" range). The desired goal for Louise's play of $10000 falls into the range of "10000 to 14999" where 54% of the projects have had a successful outcome. Very similarly the range "5000 to 9999" has 55% of successful campaigns. A 1% difference is not that important but there were more than twice as many projects in this range. Out of 72 projects in "10000 to 14999" 39 were successful and 33 failed, however there were 169 projects in the "5000 to 9999" range, 93 projects were successful and 76 failed.
To analyze the Kickstarter data, it was necessary to transform timestamp dates into a working Excel date for both campaign start and end dates. For that the following converter was used to check the Unix Timestamps: https://www.epochconverter.com/ Converted dates through excel Formula were added to the data sheet. To have an initial sense of the data a series of pivot tables and graphs were obtained.
- To do so it was important to review the data type for the cells, since the initial file had various formats and when using Excel formulas, the final value might not be in the appropriate cell type.
- Another important aspect was to separate the data into secondary sheets to further analyze data subgroups, for example, successful vs failed campaigns and therefore, determine their key differentiators.
- May is the best month to launch the Kickstarter campaign.
- December is the least favorable month to launch the Kickstarter campaign.
- Louise's play Fever goal of funding $10 000 appears to have a positive success change.
- Data shows that projects with smaller goals are more common and have greater chance of success, if reductions on the budget are possible reducing the crowdfunding goal would be favorable to its success.
This data set provides a worldly view of crowdfunding campaigns, differentiating the campaigns only by country. For the current objective, more specific information about the campaigns in the US could provide more accurate trends, perhaps cultural hubs and more populated areas would behave differently than their counterparts.
- Having noticed the tendencies of success by launch date and goal, further evaluation improves the recommendations. For example, evaluating smaller goals ranges around $10 000 since its Lousie target amount.
- An additional table evaluating the time it took for each to achieve the goal could also be useful to set a real expectation of how long it would take to obtain the required funds.