Kickstarter Campaigns

Summary:

Have you ever wondered what makes a successful Kickstarter campaign? In this project, over 4,000 campaigns were organized into Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables and Charts to discover trends between many factors that make up a campaign: including its category, sub-category, original goal, and country, to name a few. Explore the dataset on this website by looking at the different pivot tables, campaign outcome chart, and the raw datapoints on the data page.

Discoveries:

After analyzing a sample of 4,000 projects, there are three conclusions that can be drawn about Kickstarter campaigns:

  1. When taking a look at the successful campaigns by month compared to the total campaigns, the best months to start a campaign include:
    • May, where there is a 61% success rate.
    • February, where there is a 60% success rate.
    • April, where there is a 60% success rate.
    • The worst month to start a campaign is December, where there is a 44% success rate.
  2. Theater, specifically with the sub-category ‘Plays,’ is the most frequent Kickstarter campaign category and it has the greatest number of successful campaigns, suggesting that Kickstarter is primarily used for funding theater projects.
    • May and June seem to be the best months to start a theater campaign, with a 65-67% success rate.
  3. Music has the highest probability of success, with an overall success rate of 77%, suggesting that a campaign with the category of music would most likely be successful at reaching its goal.

Some limitations of the dataset include:

  1. Looking at the campaigns by country, nearly 74% of the data is from the United States, which may not accurately predict the potential success of campaigns in other countries.
  2. Additionally, because theater is the largest category of campaigns, this could skew the success probabilities of other categories if the overall analysis was used to predict the potential for success of a campaign from another category.
    • To accurately predict the success of future campaigns, it would be best to consider the specific category and sub-category success probabilities in addition to the whole.