How to use BackerKit Incentives

What are the benefits of incentives?

Offering early bird and/or returning backer incentives on your crowdfunding campaign can boost your chances of success. They create a sense of urgency, attracting early backers and generating initial momentum. Exclusive rewards for previous backers also can also help build and maintain a loyal supporter base. For more on how BackerKit Crowdfunding creators are using incentives and other engagement tools, check out this help doc.

How to use Incentives

When setting up your project, you can access "Incentives" on the left admin dashboard. Select the Incentive type (either "Early Bird" or "Returning Backer") and add a short description.

Early Bird incentives will be applied during checkout to anyone who backs in the first 48 hours.
Returning Backer incentives will be applied during checkout to anyone that BackerKit recognizes as a previous backer of yours.

What to Offer:

Offer a free item. In the tabletop category, the most common items are free minis, promo packs/exclusive cards, art prints, patches, dice or other kinds of accessories. In other categories, we've seen complimentary stickers, keychains, and enamel pins.
Offer a free digital content. You can use BackerKit's Digital Download feature after the campaign to distribute a free file or download.
A dollar amount of credit to use in the pledge manager after the campaign.

What Not To Offer:

Percentage-based discounts. If you want to offer a discounted pledge level, you can set up the pledge level at a discounted price and HIDE that pledge level after the 'early bird' time has elapsed.
Free shipping — this is a lot harder to set up than one might think and is not recommended.

Where to Highlight the Incentives?

We recommend highlighting the campaign incentives in Pre Launch Emails before launch and in Story Page, Promotional Banner and Project Updates after launch.

Pre Launch Emails — it is important to communicate to backers the extra freebies or discount that backers qualify for by backing within the first 48 hours or returning to pledge.
Story Page — an Incentives section on your Story page should highlight the special incentives offered to backers during the Campaign. If you have images to go with the incentives, be sure to add those in.
Promotion Banner — You can call out your incentive by setting up a "Promotional Banner" on

Project Details page —> Additional Options tab from the Project section.

Project Updates — it is important to highlight the incentives that backers are leaving on the table by creating a sense of urgency and FOMO.

Where do backers see incentives?

Confirmation Page: Qualified backers will automatically see the incentive in the Bonus Rewards section of their Pledge Summary as they check out.

How are incentives tracked and applied?

When your Crowdfunding campaign ends, BackerKit will import the backer data into your Pledge Manager.

To apply incentives, navigate to "Segments" —> "Advanced Segment Actions" on the sidebar of your pledge manager and click "Generate segments of incentives offered:"

This will create groups of backers who qualified for your incentives. Navigate back to "Segments," click into the segments, and use "Segment Actions" to add any free items that these backers have qualified for.

If you want to exclude "failed" backers or "digital backers" from the incentive segment, check out this help doc.