manuelelizaldi / kickstarter-analysis

An Analysis on Kickstarter Campaigns

Kickstarting with Excel

Overview of Project: We analyzed data of Kickstarter projects around several countries and with different characteristics to better determine how each variable contributes to the result of a Kickstarter campaign.

Purpose: Understand how launch dates and funding goals affect the outcome of a Kickstarter campaign to help our client take better decisions based on data.

Analysis and Challenges: Our client is interested in launching a Play so we filtered our data to this category. During this project we analyzed how the monetary goal to kickstart a project and it’s the launch date affect the outcome of the campaign.

Analysis of Outcomes Based on Launch Date: 1. Based on the graph we can determine that the percentage of successful campaigns launched in May and June is larger compared to the rest of the year. 2. There is a spike of failed campaigns launched in October. Our client has a better probability of success if the project is launched in May or June.

Analysis of Outcomes Based on Goals: 1. Our client could be better off with a lower goal. There is a higher percentage of successful projects with lower goals. 2. The client should aim for a goal to kickstart her project within the ranges of $1,000 to $5,000 or $35,000 to $45,000. Based on the graph, there are more successful kickstarter plays that ask for these amounts.

Challenges and Difficulties Encountered: The client’s goal is to launch a Kickstarter play, so we had to take this in to consideration for filtering our data. Some of the information in the dataset was not relevant for our analysis. Other challenge we encountered was that we had to convert Unix dates to a more readable format. Likewise, the dataset didn’t include Percentage Funded and Average Donation variables so we had to calculate them. Some of the limitations of this dataset were that we had to filter the Category and Subcategory columns to have two separate columns and this made the information more manageable. We could have included a table where we analyze the Kickstarter plays in the country where our client wishes to start her campaign.

Results: As we analyzed in the graphs, kickstarter plays with goals between the ranges of $1,000 to $5,000 and $35,000 to $45,000 have a higher probability of becoming successful and this should be paired with a lunch date in the months of May or June.