Maintaining Campaign Momentum with Stretch Goals

June 19, 2013 · Tips & Insights

Maintaining Campaign Momentum with Stretch Goals

Once you’ve hit your goal it can be difficult to maintain momentum for your campaign. If you’re interested in continuing to raise funds, and your project is such that you can expand and use the additional funds, then you should consider adding a Stretch Goal to your campaign!

What is a Stretch Goal?

A Stretch goal is an additional funding goal that will finance another specific step of the project.

Example: A video game project may want to raise $50k to produce a game with 10 levels. Once they’ve hit $50k, they add on a stretch goal of $60k and use the additional $10k to make an additional level for their game.

What can a stretch goal do?

It can be hard to maintain campaign momentum once a campaign has hit it’s goal. A concrete stretch can help to motivate contributors around a specific purpose. A campaign can even have multiple stretch goals if they meet their initial stretch goal.

Stretch goals can be especially helpful if the project you have in mind has a high budget. If you want to raise $80k to film a movie, but think that amount of funding is beyond your network, consider lowering the goal. You may be able to make a bare-bones version for $30k. Once you hit that initial goal, you can add a $50k stretch goal for “Additional locations and cast.” If you hit this stretch goal, you can add another stretch goal of $60 for a car chase scene and one explosion.

What makes a good stretch goal?

A good stretch goal has three key components:

It’s Concrete.

“We want more money” isn’t a compelling reasons to contribute unless someone is deeply involved in your mission. We recommend that you find another concrete goal for your project.

Many projects have natural next steps that work with stretch goals. The Skullgirls videogame campaign had clear stretch goals— new charachters and levels— which carried them from their initial goal of $150k to ~$830k. You can click through to their campaign to see more details on their system of stretch goals and how it was implemented.

It Benefits Those Who Have Already Contributed

The best stretch goals mobilize your contributors by offering them something. Skullgirls, the videogame campaign mentioned above, could build and distribute new game levels if they hit their stretch goals. Because this stretch goal benefited all contributors who have already contributed, it motivated all of the campaign’s contributors to reach out and share the campaign with their own networks because they wanted the new levels for themselves.

The New Goal is Reasonable

Hitting your $10k goal within your first day is great, but it doesn’t mean that a $50k stretch goal is reasonable. While there’s no rule of thumb, remember that you should be funding the main portion of your project with your initial goal. If you’d like to raise fund beyond doubling your goal, consider a series of stretch goals that breaks that into smaller, compelling steps.