How To Get Your Kickstarter Project Chosen As A Staff Pick

Entrepreneurs and other users have been seeking the secret to getting their projects selected as a Staff Pick — a designation that one of Kickstarter’s 98 employees can give a project based on personal tastes. Staff Picks can get prime placement on the website, be promoted to Kickstarter’s 2 million followers on Facebook and Twitter, or appear in Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” e-mail, which reaches more than 4 million in-boxes every week. Users get in on the promotional activity by updating their pages to add a bright green badge or banner they create themselves, even though Kickstarter discourages the practice. Shelley Harper scoured Google, read blog posts and studied past Staff Picks before launching a Kickstarter campaign for her business, ConQuest Adventure Journal, which makes journals for fans of comic book convention Comic-Con, to store autographs, photos and other mementos. Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark did not make other employees available to be interviewed, but says workers spend a big part of their day keeping up with projects that are posted on the site and pick ones that have a good video, give colorful updates about the project or have an imaginative idea. Recent ones include a company that makes jewelry from wool, a maker of homemade marshmallows and a company that makes an electric toothbrush that tells users if they are brushing their teeth correctly. Another employee, Katie Needs, says she backed Nerdwax, a wax that can be rubbed on eye glasses to keep them from falling off the nose, because she’s “a lifelong four-eyes.” Kickstarter wants to play a bigger role in the success of startups, said Paul Levinson, a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University. Elemoon, a maker of high-tech bracelets that light up to alert wearers of a call or text, says just 11 percent of its $122,725 in donations came directly from being featured prominently as a Staff Pick on Kickstarter’s technology page. The chances of a project getting successfully funded jumps to 92 percent if it’s a Staff Pick, up from about 50 percent for others, according to Ethan Mollick, a business professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Kickstarter has also started showing its love by opening its pocketbook. Since March, Kickstarter has given money to nearly 180 projects.