Looking to offer its creators a platform to showcase their successfully crowdfunded projects, Kickstarter has launched Spotlight, customizable presentation pages that can be used for marketing, educational or commercial purposes.
Spotlight offers a way to present successful Kickstarter projects to the public beyond the site's well-known, but static, campaign pages. Kickstarter's standard campaign pages allow a project creators to list the funding goal, share video, show backer rewards and detail background information on the project.
Unlike a standard Kickstarter project page, Spotlight uses a simple design to allow creators to display and promote their projects to the public. Visually distinctive, Spotlight pages are highly customizable and flexible. They provide a link to the original project page (“story”), a link to the project comments, and a link called Updates (a new feature that offers a timeline of events charting the launch of a funding project through to post-funding activities). While Spotlight itself is not a retail platform, creators can customize the page to link to a store, related website, or whatever.
Kickstarter has created Spotlight pages for each of its 80,925 successfully funded projects to date. The original Kickstarter project pages will continue to exist on the Kickstarter site, and Spotlight will link to them.
To announce the Spotlight debut, Kickstarter has partnered with Medium, the blog publishing platform, to offer more information on the feature. Successful publishing projects like Last Gasp Books and Derby Life show how the new feature can be used.
A spokesperson for Kickstarter told PW that Spotlight is part of an overall effort to help creators display and promote successfully funded projects. Kickstarter has already partnered with iTunes, MoMa, and the New York Times to create branded showcases for successful projects.
“Our mission is to help bring creative projects to life,” the spokesperson added. Spotlight “brings the behind-the-scenes process of bringing the project to life to the foreground, and reminds people that Kickstarter's more than just funding.”