Kickstarter has now finally opened its gates to Canadian users, meaning that a legion of Canadian entrepreneurs and start-ups can now start adding their projects to the site and get funding for their ideas. This news was broken with a tweet, with the official Kickstarter Twitter account posting the following:
“Excited to announce that Canada-based creators can start building projects right now!”
So if you’re sitting at home in Canada right now and you have an idea for a project you want to launch, all you have to do is click the ‘Start New Project’ button and then choose Canada from the drop down list. Projects added to the site this way will open to the public on September 9th. They will be listed in Canadian dollars and will be included alongside US and UK-based projects.
The Crowdfunding Scene Abroad
However, just because Canada hasn’t been able to add their own projects until now, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been taking part at all – they were already able to back the projects they liked (just like most countries around the world) and have been active players in getting many different ideas off the ground.
And this is something that’s worth considering when you’re on the campaign trail for your own project. Why only promote your project in English speaking countries when countries all around the world are getting involved in backing the projects they care about? Surely you should be looking further than your own front yard and taking advantage of the international nature of Kickstarter?
To do this, it would help to know precisely where the highest numbers of backers on Kickstarter come from. After some digging around, I managed to find some project creators who were willing to share which countries most of their backers came from. Note that these statistics are not completely representative of the general public; this is only from a few projects and only 10% of backers share their country of origin. However, it should be enough to give you a rough idea of where the majority of the funding is going to come from.
The Top Countries for Kickstarter Backers
1 The US
2 Canada
3 The UK
4 Australia
5 Germany
6 France
7 Sweden
8 Norway
9 Netherlands
10 New Zealand
What to Take From This
As you can see then, you should still predominantly focus on English speaking countries, and in particular on the US. The Kickstarter project to ‘bring back Veronica Mars’ found 9,834 backers in the United States, compared with just 922 and 768 from Canada and the UK respectively.
However, there’s something else to consider here too – most campaigns are targeted towards English speakers. The project pages are normally written in English, just as most of the sites they are promoted on will tend to be English.
And if 429 backers were willing to get behind that same project in Germany, even though they there wasn’t any promotion in German, imagine how many might have gotten involved if there was? Could this be the secret to making sure your campaigns are a success?
One thing’s for sure: Kickstarter needs to start inviting more creators from other nationalities. We might just be seeing the tip of the iceberg of what crowdfunding would be capable of if it went truly global.
