Kickstarting with Excel

Overview of Project

Kickstarter campaigns help crowdfund creative ideas so they can become reality. A customer who would like to crowdfund a play in the United States. We performed an analysis of a Kickstarter campaigns dataset to determine what makes a Kickstarter project successful. We used Excel to help perform the analysis using advanced filters, formulas, and charts.

Purpose

The motive of this project was to help a customer set up a successful crowdfunding campaign for her play with the estimated goal of $12,000.

Analysis and Challenges

Before starting the analysis the data was formatted for better categorization, sorting, and statistical analysis. First, we looked at trends simply based on project categories in the US. The analysis revealed that of all campaigns in the theater category 57% are successfully funded. The three categories with the highest success rates were Music, Film and video, and Theater.

Another bar graph (Subcategory outcome) was created to find out the number of successful "plays" campaigns. There were approximately 61% campaigns with successful funding for the plays in the US.

Analysis of Outcomes Based on Launch Date

The highest number of Successful Kickstarter campaigns took place during May and June from the year 2009 to 2017. The month that launched the highest number of theater campaigns were also May and June. However, May, June, July, and October all had roughly the same number of failed campaigns launched.

Analysis of Outcomes Based on Goals

The findings from the line chart below created to find the relation between the estimated goal with the outcomes of the campaigns displayed that a high percentage of successful campaigns had an estimated fund goal of less than $5000. Relatively, the percentage of failed campaigns was high when the funding goals were more than $25000.

Challenges and Difficulties Encountered

One of the challenges encountered was that it was difficult to draw conclusions based on a small dataset. There might be other reasons for the failure of campaigns apart from higher estimated goal, which have not been determined due to the lack of data. The data does not have enough information about the campaigns among the states of a country.

Results

• The main conclusion about the Outcomes-based on Launch Date drawn from the analysis is that the Kickstarter campaign should be started in the period between the spring season up until mid-summer, as the rate of success during that timeframe is higher for theater campaigns. The months of April to June have shown consistent successful campaigns from the year 2014 to 2016. Relatively, the number of failed campaigns has also been consistently low during June from 2014 to 2016.

• The other important noticeable interpretation from the analysis would be that the Kickstarter campaigns for the theater category that there would be a higher risk of starting a campaign during the winter period. This time of the year presents more failed and canceled campaigns.

• The findings from the outcome based on goals showed that the estimated goals higher the $10,000 have a higher percentage of failure. The percentage of successful campaigns is higher when the estimated goal is between $1000 to $5000.

• As mentioned above, the limitations of kickstarter dataset is that the dataset is not large enough. It does not cover all the crowdfunding campaigns. The dataset is only inclusive of years from 2011 to 2017.

• The Theater outcomes by launch date could also have been visualized using the area chart to show the development of each variable at a time.