An analysis on several thousand kickstarter projects to find trends in successful campaigns. The analysis focused on successful theatre kickstarter campaigns in the United States. (Project for UC Berkeley Data Analytics Boot Camp)
Data was provided as CSV files as part of class.
On the Kickstarter Analysis spreadsheet, the outcomes of the Kickstarter campaigns have applied color coding in the 'outcomes' column. The level of funding reached is visible in the 'percentage funded' column. The average donation for each campaign is calculated in the 'average donation' column. In looking at the data, there were 525 successful theatre campaigns in the United States. The timing of the campaigns were charted and found that May contained the most successful campaigns while December had the least. Five plays from Edinburgh were found in the Kickstarter data and analyzed in a separate sheet. The successful and failed United States play Kickstarter campaigns were analyzed to find the mean, median, standard deviation and IQR of the pledges and goals. These are reflected on the 'descriptive stats' sheet. The standard deviations are all roughly twice the IQR, except in failed Kickstarters the standard deviation was higher so there may be some high goals that resulted in failed Kickstarters. For a possible future project, the goal amounts musical Kickstarter campaigns in Great Britain were analyzed. The distribution of the amounts is shown in the attached chart.
In further analysis of the data, I found that the greatest odds of success for Kickstarter campaigns specific to plays are less than $5,000. There were a higher percentage of successful campaigns above $35,000 but there were relatively few campaigns in that goal range to compare provide recommendations on goals that high. Other factors, such as strong local community support may affect the outcomes of these type of campaigns. In looking at the timing of the campaign, as you can see in the chart, May produced the most amount of successful campaigns in the theatre parent category. In contrast, December had the least amount of successful campaigns. Campaigns not specific to plays are reflected in this chart including potentially building projects for theatres, and they may be affecting the overall results. Overall though, it seems that warmer months in general seemed to have better results than the winter months. Based on the analysis, a Kickstarter campaign for a play in the United States with a goal of close to $5,000 and launched in May will most likely be successful and for a better than 50% rate of success the campaign goal should stay below $20,000.
Excel