There’s another side of Kickstarter that most people never get to see. These are the tools that help creators stay on top of their projects and communicate with backers. We've recently released a slew of big improvements to these tools, so we thought we'd give everyone a quick tour.

Backer Report

At the heart of the creator tools is the Backer Report, which lists each project's backers, their chosen reward, and other information. Today the Backer Report is getting a major overhaul, with greatly improved filtering and search functions that make it much easier for creators to organize and drill down into their backers.

Today we also added a "reward sent" checkbox to the Backer Report so creators can keep track of which backers they've taken care of. The new Backer Report is available to all project creators beginning today.

Surveys

Once a creator is ready to begin sending out rewards, they use Kickstarter's survey tool to request the necessary info from backers. Here's what the survey creator wizard looks like:

Once backers respond to the survey, their information is automagically integrated into the Backer Report. From there you can export it in a file that you can open in Excel and other programs.

We also provide creators with a unique card for each backer that collects their info, survey responses, notes from the creator, and other information.

Project Dashboard

The flashiest of our creator tools is the Project Dashboard — a central hub for live information about a project’s progress and stats. At the top of the Project Dashboard is a graph of the project's funding progress:

Through the Dashboard, creators can track where their pledges are coming from. The Dashboard lists each referral source and the number of pledges generated. There's even a pie chart showing what percentage of backers came from sources within Kickstarter and how many came from external sources.

We're excited about today's updates to the creator tools, and we'll continue to work on making them even better. Thanks for joining us for our tour! Perhaps you'd like to start a project of your own?

Comments

1. Creator Katherine Pan on March 11
  
  hooray!
2. Creator Meredith Ramirez & Ricefield Collective on March 11
  
  <3
3. Creator Jason Glover on March 11
  
  Really like the addition of the Shipment sent check-off! That will really be useful.
4. Creator Drekfletch on March 11
  
  As someone contemplating a project, it's nice to see a bit of the back end from after the project goes live.
  
  Also, I'm part of those last two data sets! #WeAreTheMedia!
5. Creator Ian Linkletter on March 11
  
  Really cool stuff! Great to see you thinking about Creator workflow so carefully.
6. Creator Christian Steudtner on March 12
  
  Improving stuff is always good, the better the tools, the better the experience.
7. Creator Zac Gowen on March 12
  
  Do the backers get a notification when we check the box for "Reward Sent"
8. Creator Meaghan O'Connell on March 12
  
  @Zac Gowen: Ha! I debated whether we needed that supporting copy in this tool (it's in there, in a tooltip thing). NO, backers don't get notified. It's a private tracking tool just for creators. Woooo. Or boo, depending on what you wanted.
9. Creator Joshua A.C. Newman on March 12
  
  That survey stuff is huge! Thank you so much!
  
  For the next iteration, please make it so we can include or exclude questions from survey levels. Having to re-enter redundant questions is badly error-prone. I have yet to do it right. Also, marking some survey questions as optional or conditional (e.g., if you answered question 1, you must answer question 2) to backers would be awesome.
  
  Thank you so much for these improvements. I'm always blown away by you guys' attendance to these details.
10. Creator Lee & Linda Shaw on March 15
  
  And referencing Zac Gowen, could they get a notice as well as a package tracking number too perhaps?
11. Creator Yuan Yuan on March 21
  
  These creator tools seem very cool, but would you also considering developing backer tools? While there are pages dedicated to certain filtering rules ('recently launched', 'ending soon', etc), I would like more control over filter and sort. In particular, I'm interested in browsing projects which are nearly completely funded, e.g. 90% funding or higher, preferably sorted by deadline.
  
  Right now the projects are organized by category, which presupposes that category is the important dimension. It may be to some backers, but it happens to be of limited importance to me (or at least, the set of categories in which I'm interested is much greater than 1). I would prefer some tools which give some flexibility and allow backers with different priorities to use the site easily.
12. Creator Eve Stephen on March 25
  
  Suppose a creator wants to offer a bundle of rewards (10 items to be sent to 10 of the backer's friends by postal mail, or digital downloads sent to 10 email addresses). Is there a way that the donor/backer can enter the 10 postal addresses, or 10 email addresses, into an efficient database so the creator can send the items easily?
13. Creator Bernie Worrell Orchestra on April 12
  
  there is so much stuff to read (and I'm a reader!!!) and I'm swamped. Can someone just tell me -- specifically -- where da heck is the Backer Report?????
14. Creator Anita Giraldo on April 16
  
  one of the tabs at the top of your page. You'll see it if you sign in.
15. Creator Eric Norman on April 16
  
  Good work, guys. The dashboard/referral data is awesome! For the backer report/rewards sent, it might be cool to have a way to check "reward received" or even enter the tracking data and have it automated. What I learned at Toyota was the job isn't finished at shipping, but not until the other side receives what was promised.
16. Creator Ray & Sarah Rhamey on April 26
  
  I love the word "automagically."