Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding platform aimed at helping people get their ideas funded while building a community of fans to support their ideas. While Kickstarter publishes many advice and best-practices articles on their blog, over half of campaigns still fail.

Why does this matter? Well unlike their competitor, Indiegogo, Kickstarter campaign projects follow an "all or nothing" funding model. This means that if a Kickstarter campaign fails, both the project creators and backers are disappointed, as well as the people who did contribute because the project will not be completed in any capacity.

Objective

• Understand the marketplace of Kickstarter including timing of campaigns posted, types of projects, location of campaigns, description of campaigns and more
• Provide insight into attributes that set campaigns up for a higher rate of success to inform campaign creation in the future

This dataset contains data on 20,632 Kickstarter campaigns on the site as of February 1st 2017(more to be updated in future versions). Important attributes are described below:

Project: a finite work with a clear goal that you’d like to bring to life (aka campaign) Funding goal: amount of money that a creator needs to complete their project Name: name of project on Kickstarter Blurb: the short description displayed under the name of your project and on the browse page Pledged and backers: amount of money that a project has raised and people that have supported it at the point of the API pull State: successful, failed, cancelled, live or suspended Deadline, state changed, created at, launched at: deadline given for successful funding, state changed when campaign went to success or failure, time the project was created at, time the project was launched at Other attributes in this dataset: country, currency, category To attain a deeper understanding of our data and to have more attributes to explore, we also created the following features out of the data for our analysis:

Name and blurb (description) length including and excluding “stop words” - name_len_clean, blurb_len_clean Day of week and hour of the day for creation, launch and deadline date - deadline_weekday, created_at_weekday, lauched_at_weekday, deadline_hour, created_at_hour, launched_at_hour Days between creation and launch, and days between launch and deadline - create_to_launch, launch_to_deadline

This project was done by Rachel Downs and Muhammad Ghuari for and MIS elective at UT Austin.