Woohoo! Our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for More Than Two is now live!
We have both been neglecting our entire lives for the last week while we’ve geared up to launch this crowdfunding campaign. (Seriously, who knew it would be so much work? Whew!) We’ve been shooting movies, writing copy, peering at spreadsheets, putting crowdfunding incentives together…and we’ve made some interesting packages. Want Badass McProblemsolver to solve your poly-related problem in a video? Want a custom-designed programmable sex toy? There’s all that and more available!
We’re both really excited about this project. The book More Than Two will take over where other books about polyamory leave off, with practical, no-nonsense, 100% unicorn-and-rainbow-free tips for making your relationships happy and vibrant.
The “Gogo Factor” and Why We Need Your Help NOW
Indiegogo uses a formula it calls the “Gogo Factor” to decide which campaigns it’s going to promote. The Gogo Factor measures the activity of a campaign: donations (large and small–so even those $1 donations help), page views, comments and social media activity. So do all that stuff. After you donate, share the page (using the share buttons on the Indiegogo page), leave a comment on the campaign, and check back regularly, as we’ll be posting video updates featuring our good buddy Badass McProblemsolver.
Most important, please don’t wait. Activity in the first couple of days of a campaign is critical, or so we’re told. If our Gogo Factor goes high enough, we can get featured on the front page of Indiegogo.
So click. Watch. Donate. Share. And thank you.
Eve I donated to the blog site listed. I hope that donation goes to your book project – “More That Two” – that is what I meant it for.
Thank you! I don’t see your donation in the Indiegogo stats, so I’m guessing you gave directly through PayPal to morethantwo.com? That’s for Franklin’s website, but we’ll make sure it gets to the book.
(I tried to leave this comment on Indegogo but…[0])
Two points to consider re the campaign:
1. The “umm, please consider donating to cover shipping” message possibly shouldn’t be buried only most of the way into a video (people get emailed the text and so may skim it quickly even if they’re busy; they have to actively go out of their way to make time to watch the video);
2. I don’t know if you have any control over it, but the “International Shipping” is really an add on to other “Perks” rather than a separate “Perk”, so ideally there’d be some way to pay for it at the same time, rather than as two contributions (that you then need to match up, both with their own shipping addresses!). Even a, eg, $45 level which was “paperback with international shipping” might make things easier for new backers.
Ewen
PS: Feel free to choose the slowest shipping method available. USPS low priority/surface might take weeks. But the eBook will arrive well before it anyway. And the slower shipping should be half the price, or less.
[0] Apparently one is limited to 500 characters and supposed to guess when reaching the limit — if you go over that unstated limit it just throws the comment away and says “try again” 🙁 Fortunately I’m wise to such ways and skilled in the powers of cut’n’paste…
Thanks Ewen. Do you have a suggestion for where else we should mention international shipping? Currently it’s in the page copy and in the perk, as well as in the video.
We realized we needed to account for international shipping after people had already started buying the perks, and you’re not allowed to change a perk after someone has chosen it. If we wanted to update the perks to say “add $20 for international shipping,” we’d have needed to update all of them, which we couldn’t do by then. And to go with your suggestion, a $45 “paperback with international shipping” option, we’d have to duplicate all the perks this way (the $25-$150 option; we can eat the international shipping above that), but we’re only allowed a total of 20 perks, and we’re up to 15 now. We’d like to keep some available because we’re thinking of adding some perks later.
So adding the $20 perk was the best compromise we could come up with. We figured at $20, people would see it before they got to the first perk they’d actually need it for. And it does specify in the text of the $20 perk that you can just add $20 to whatever perk you’re getting, rather than buying a separate perk, if you prefer.
Any thoughts on how to get around all this would be welcome.
Definitely choosing the slowest shipping speeds 🙂
Having gone looking I did find it in the page copy. It’s… further down that I’d probably have looked otherwise. I’m not sure there’s a good solution there though. The best idea I have is to put it as a single line, in parenthesis, at the _top_ of the OMG Swag section, rather than near the bottom of that section. Probably with a “If you’re overseas we’d love it if you added $20 to any contribution for a Perk we need to ship to you; see below for how to do this”.
Having looked more closely I’ve found that it is actually possible to change the amount after selecting a “Perk”. For some reason when I looked at the UI previously I’d assumed that “amount to contribute” entry box was tied to the “no Perk, I just want to contribute” option but it seems to be active for all of them. Possibly I’m not the only one to miss that functionality.
Text like “Select the Perk you want and scroll back up to change the total amount” might help, given there’s no obvious “I’d like Perk Y and to give an extra $20” entry box — and the UI auto-scrolls you down to entering address details as soon as you select a Perk. (Cf, a bunch of stores for non-profits have a “donate $Y” option on their checkout as an extra right near the “continue with your order”.)
Mostly it seems like the Indegogo UI is poorly designed to handle the reality of shipping physical goods, let alone around the world. (An obvious site-wide thing would be to have an “I’d like to contribute the cost of postage to me too” button on everyone checkout including a physical item: the site knows the countries they’re going to, but the people creating Perks have to guess when setting prices.)
Ewen
Yeah, that would be really useful, especially since we still have to pay 7% off of the postage added as though it were a regular contribution–plus it counts toward our goal, even though we keep none of it. It would make the most sense if there were an option to add shipping as a separate amount, and exclude it from Indiegogo fees and from the goal total.